Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with foreign matter."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1774

"Hence Princes generally neglect nothing which may bring luxury into esteem: they recommend it by their example; they display every where pageantry and magnificence, and are the first to sow in the minds of their subjects those seeds of corruption."

— Marat, Jean-Paul (1743-1793)

Date: 1775

Young thought is "spread" by "kindly cares"

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

"Vital airs" alone will not impart "health and vigour" to the soul

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

The opening heart is warmed byt "kindly cares"

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

Women, "like garden-trees," seldom show fruit, "till time has robbed them of the more specious blossom"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1776-1789

"The ancient families of Rome had successively fallen beneath the tyranny of the Cæsars; and, whilst those princes were shackled by the forms of a commonwealth, and disappointed by the repeated failure of their posterity, it was impossible that any idea of hereditary succession should have ...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1774-1776, 1788, 1803

"Well-skill'd / To form the growing soul, and on its young / And opening bud to fix the impression deep / Of every generous thought"

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

Date: 1778

"A thirst for knowledge, which can never be gratified, would not have been implanted; a mind which was to be chained to the earth, would never have been bent on the skies"

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1779, 1781

"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)