Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Mr. Showman, cried she, approaching, I am told you has something to shew in that there sort of magic lanthorn, by which folks can see themselves on the inside; I protest, as my lord Beetle says, I am sure it will be vastly pretty, for I have never seen any thing like it before. But how; are we t...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1776

"'This temper of soul,' says the Guardian, speaking of meekness and humility,'keeps our understanding tight about us.' Whether the author had any meaning in this expression, or what it was, I shall not take upon me to determine; but hardly could any thing more incongruous in the way of metaphor, ...

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1779, 1781

"Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanicks, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1781

"So that all material objects, in themselves, and to each other, are dark and naked: to the mind alone are they cloathed in all the pleasing variety of sensible qualities."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

Date: 1781

"Mind, like a bride from a nobler family, enriches matter by its union, and brings as a dower, possessions before unknown. Henceforth matter appears cloathed in a gayer and richer garment; and the fruits of this union are a new progeny, to which matter, confining its alliance to its own family, c...

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

Date: 1782

"Alas! there are some stupid souls, formed of such phlegmatic, adverse materials, that you might sooner strike conception into a flannel petticoat--or out of one--(now keep your temper I beg, sweet Sir) than convince their simple craniums that six and seven makes thirteen."

— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)

Date: 1783

"For although words and thoughts are different things (as appears from this, that deaf men think, who know nothing of words) yet words are, as it were, the dress, or the guise, in which our thoughts present themselves"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1790

"All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and ...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1791

"It can be accounted for only in this way; that by reading and meditation, and a very close inspection of life, he had accumulated a great fund of miscellaneous knowledge, which, by a peculiar promptitude of mind, was ever ready at his call, and which he had constantly accustomed himself to cloth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)