Date: 1755

"When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions; as any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1759

"If I am accidentally left alone for a few hours, said he, my inveterate persuasion rushes upon my soul, and my thoughts are chained down by some irresistible violence, but they are soon disentangled by the prince's conversation, and instantaneously released at the entrance of Pekuah."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: December 29, 1759

"But as we advance forward into the crowds of life, innumerable delights sollicit our inclinations, and innumerable cares distract our attention; the time of youth is passed in noisy frolicks; manhood is led on from hope to hope, and from project to project; the dissoluteness of pleasure, the ine...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1760, 1761

"Reason, collected in herself, disdains / The slavish yoke of arbitrary chains"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1762-3

"Opinions should be free as air; / No man, whate'er his rank, what're / His qualities, a claim can found / That my opinion must be bound, / And square with his; such slavish chains / From foes the liberal soul disdains; / Nor can, though true to friendship, bend / To wear them even from a friend."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

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: 1763

"Doth Virtue in thy bosom brighter glow, / Or from a Spring more pure doth Action flow? / Is not thy Soul bound with those very chains / Which shackle us, or is that SELF, which reigns / O'er Kings and Beggars, which in all we see / Most strong and sov'reign, only weak in Thee?"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1763

"Unwilling to condemn, thy soul disdains / To wear vile faction's arbitrary chains."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1764?

"This melting mass of flesh she may control / With iron ribs, she cannot chain my soul."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1765

"What though, his feet in fetters bound, / His soul th' afflicting irons wound / Yet, Joseph, patient bear thy lot."

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)