Date: 1768

"Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw--and 'tis thou who lifts him up to Heaven--eternal fountain of our feelings!--'tis here I trace thee--and this is thy divinity which stirs within...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"The old man rose up to meet me, and with a respectful cordiality would have me sit down at the table; my heart was sat down the moment I enter'd the room; so I sat down at once like a son of the family."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1773

"The two great movements of the soul, which the molder of our frames has placed in them for the incitement of virtue and the prevention of vice, are the desire of honour, and the fear of shame: but the perversion of these qualities, which the refinement of society is peculiarly unhappy in making,...

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1773

"For some time, the whirling of his brain gave him no leisure to exercise any faculty that could be termed thinking; when that sort of delirium subsided, it left him only to make room for more exquisite, though less turbulent, anguish."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1773

"After having weathered so many successive disasters, I am at last arrived near the place of my nativity; fain would I hope, that a parent and a sister, whose tender remembrance, mingled with that of happier days, now rushes on my soul, are yet alive to pardon the wanderings of my youth, and rece...

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1773

"Not but that there moved something unusual in the bosom of Harriet, from the declaration of her lover, and in his, from the attempt which Providence had interposed to disappoint; he consoled himself, however, with the reflexion, that he had not gone such a length as to alarm her simplicity, and ...

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1773

"His sister, whose gentle heart began to droop under the thoughts of their separation, he employed every argument to comfort."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1773

"The flattering language of his letters could not arrest the progress of that time, which must divulge the shame of her he had undone; but they soothed the tumults of a soul to whom his villany was yet unknown, and whose affections his appearance of worth, of friendship, and nobleness of mind, ha...

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1792

"A thousand ideas seemed crowding upon my mind; but they have expelled each other as quickly as they came, and I scarcely know what to add."

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1794

"I shuddered at the possibility of his having overheard the words of my soliloquy. But this idea, alarming as it was, had not the power immediately to suspend the career of my reflections"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)