Date: w. prior to April 1770; 1785, 1837, 1875

"Not yet contented with his boundless sway, / Which all perforce must outwardly obey, / He thought to throw his chain upon the mind; / Nor would he leave conjecture unconfined."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1771

"But, Sir, my passions are my masters; they take me where they will; and oftentimes they leave to reason and to virtue nothing but my wishes and my sighs."

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1773

"But soon, alas! this holy calm is broke; / My soul submits to wear her wonted yoke; / With shackled pinions strives to soar in vain, / And mingles with the dross of earth again."

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1774

"When they come to be a little better acquainted with themselves, and with their own species, they discover that plain right reason is, nine times in ten, the fettered and shackled attendant of the triumph of the heart and the passions; and, consequently, they address themselves nine times in ten...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774

"The nymph, who in my bosom reigns, / With such full force my heart enchains, / That nothing ever can impair / The empire she possesses there."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Date: w. c. 1751, 1775

"With darts and flames some arm his [Love's] feeble hands, / His infant brow with regal honours crown; / Whilst vanquished Reason, bound with silken bands, / Meanly submissive, falls below his throne."

— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)

Date: 1776-1789

"In the same manner [says Longinus] as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we ...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: w. 1763, 1776

"By mercy prompted his correcting hand / Inflicts the stroke of salutary pain, / To check tyrannic Passions's wild demand, / And free our Reason from it's slavish chain."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1777

"Is there no Senator, whose soul disdains / To bear about his mind the golden chains / Of base Corruption?"

— Combe, William (1742 -1823)

Date: 1777

"Not like a cloyster'd drone, to read and doze, / In undeserving, undeserv'd repose; / But reason's influence to diffuse; to clear / The enlighten'd world of every gloomy fear; / Dispel the mists of error, and unbind / Those pedant chains that clog the freeborn mind."

— Lyttleton, George, 1st Baron Lyttleton (1709-1773)