Date: 1745

"Then tell me, is your soul intire? / Does wisdom calmly hold her throne? / Then can you question each desire, / Bid this remain, and that begone?"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"Conscience, her first law broken, wounded lies; / Enfeebled, lifeless, impotent to good; / A feign'd affection bounds her utmost power."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1746

Imagination may "Bring what ideas she can find / To the great storehouse of the Mind, / Where Judgement ever sits serene, / To rule the vague and sportive queen"

— Cooke, Thomas (1703-1756)

Date: 1746

"With inward view, / Thence on the ideal kingdom swift she turns / Her eye; and instant, at her powerful glance, / The obedient phantoms vanish or appear; / Compound, divide, and into order shift, / Each to his rank, from plain perception up / To the fair forms of Fancy's fleeting train."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1748, 1749

"If reason is the slave of depraved, or distracted sense, how then can it be expected, that at that time it should be governor?"

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1749

"In return to which, Conscience, like a good Lawyer, attempted to distinguish between an absolute Breach of Trust, as here where the Goods were delivered, and a bare Concealment of what was found, as in the former Case. Avarice presently treated this with Ridicule, called it a Distinction without...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750

"The first effect of this meditation is, that it furnishes a new employment for the mind, and engages the passions on remoter objects; as kings have sometimes freed themselves from a subject too haughty to be governed and too powerful to be crushed, by posting him in a distant province, till his ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1751, 1791

"The passions are a num'rous crowd, / Imperious, positive, and loud: / Curb these licentious sons of strife; / Hence chiefly rise the storms of life: / If they grow mutinous, and rave, / They are thy masters, thou their slave."

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1752

"Assist me, Furies, with your hellish Aid, / Nor let the Tyrant Conscience more invade; / Since I am stain'd with Blood, thro' Blood I'll wade."

— Gentleman, Francis (1728-1784)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Within my bosom reigns another lord; / Honour, sole judge and umpire of itself."

— Home, John (1722-1808)