Date: May 10, 1704

"Besides, there is something individual in human minds that easily kindles at the accidental approach and collision of certain circumstances, which, though of paltry and mean appearance, do often flame out into the greatest emergencies of life."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1708

"Now, when this Form prevails to such a degree that all others are nothing before it, but it remains alone, so as to consume, with the glory of its Light, whatsoever stands; in it's way; then it is properly compared to those Glasses, which reflect Light upon themselves, and burn every thing else;...

— Ockley, Simon (bap. 1679, d. 1720)

Date: 1709

"That fatal Night the Duke felt hostile Fires in his Breast, Love was entred with all his dreadful Artillery; he took possession in a moment of the Avenues that lead to the Heart! neither did the resistance he found there serve for any thing but to make his Conquest more illustrious."

— Manley, Delarivier (c. 1670-1724)

Date: 1719

"I bad him go to the Tree, and bring me Word if he could see there plainly what they were doing; he did so, and came immediately back to me, and told me they might be plainly view'd there; that they were all about their Fire, eating the Flesh of one of their Prisoners; and that another lay bound...

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)

Date: 1719

"As long as I kept up my daily Tour to the Hill to look out, so long also I kept up the Vigour of my Design, and my Spirits seem'd to be all the while in a suitable Form for so outragious an Execution as the killing twenty or thirty naked Savages, for an Offence which I had not at all entred into...

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)

Date: 1721, 1722

"Nature, industriously favourable to men, hath not bounded itself in giving desires to men, she was willing that we should have them too, and that we should be the animated instruments of their felicity: she hath put in us the flame of the passions, to make them live easy."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1721, 1722

"I think myself almost annihilated; and I do not become sensible of my existence, till a dismal jealousy comes to kindle and produce in my heart, fear, suspicions, hatred and regret."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1741 [1740]; continued in 1741

"A Narrative which has its Foundation in TRUTH and NATURE; and at the same time that it agreeably entertains, by a Variety of curious and affecting Incidents, is intirely divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces calculated for Amusement only, tend to inflame th...

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1741 [1740]; continued in 1741

Novels and Romances may be "unnaturally inflaming to the Passions, and so full of Love andIntrigue, that hardly any of them but seem'd calculated to fire the Imagination, rather than to inform the Judgment"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1741

"But under this macerated form was concealed a mind replete with science, burning with a zeal of benefiting his fellow-creatures, and filled with an honest conscious pride, mixed with a scorn of doing or suffering the least thing beneath the dignity of a philosopher."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744); Arbuthnot, John (bap. 1677, d. 1735)