Date: 1763

"O'er crabbed authors life's gay prime to waste, / To clamp wild genius in the chains of taste, / To bear the slavish drudgery of schools, / And tamely stoop to ev'ry pedant's rules."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1777

"Is there no Senator, whose soul disdains / To bear about his mind the golden chains / Of base Corruption?"

— Combe, William (1742 -1823)

Date: 1781

"My head and ears confus'd, I find / One cannot here relax the Mind, / In vain she strives to slip her chains, / Law, Law, through all these regions reigns; / So back to Chambers I return, / More Patience, and more Law, to learn."

— Keate, George (1729-1797)

Date: w. 1791-2

"But, sent from God, his presence leaves, / To gather home his ripen'd sheaves, / To call encumber'd souls away / From fleshly bonds to boundless day, / (As when the winged hours excite, / And summon forth the morning-light) / And each to convoy to her place / Before the Eternal Father's face."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1804

"Reason, blest Goddess! who disdains / Religion's Curbs, and mental Chains."

— Collins, John [called Brush Collins] (1742-1808)

Date: 1807-8

"Much it behoves us to compute the strength / Of him, whose ruin we would work, of him, / Who vaunts himself the legate of Jehovah, / And by that title keeps our souls in thrall / And bondage worse than what our limbs endur'd / Under the yoke of Pharaoh."

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)