Date: 1752

"The Fear of which so affected the Serjeant, (for besides the Honour which he himself had for the Lady, he knew how tenderly his Friend loved her) that he was unable to speak; and had not his Nerves been so strongly braced that nothing could shake them, he had enough in his Mind to have set him a...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1753

"We often see that to reverse this boasted constancy is the work of but a single minute,--and then in vain their past professions recoil upon their minds;--in vain the idea of the forsaken fair haunts them in nightly visions."

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: 1754

"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1757, 1758, 1771, 1777

"Before my wondering sense new phantoms dance, / And stamp their horrid shapes upon my brain."

— Dodsley, Robert (1703-1764)

Date: 1758, 1781

"Alas! All Souls are subject to like Fate, / All sympathizing with the Body's State; / Let the fierce Fever burn thro' ev'ry Vein, / And drive the madding Fury to the Brain, / Nought can the Fervour of his Frenzy cool, / But Aristotle's self's a Parish Fool!"

— Hawkins, William (1721-1801)

Date: January 27, 1759.

"That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: September 1, 1759.

"The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been o...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1765, 1770

"Passions, and snow balls each by motion swell, / And Kitty finds her little heart rebel; / Full of desires she sighs for this, and that, / Her heart for ev'ry man goes pit-a-pat."

— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)

Date: 1755, 1771

"Tasteless of all that virtue gives to please, / For thought too active, and too mad for ease, / From wish to wish in life's mad vortex toss'd, / For ever struggling, and for ever lost; / He scorns religion, though her seraphs call, / And lives in rapture, or not lives at all."

— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)

Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)