Date: 1759

"A more than midnight gloom involves my soul."

— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)

Date: 1759

"He smiles contempt; as if some inward joy, / Like the sun lab'ring in a night of clouds, / Shot forth its glad'ning unresisted beams, / Chearing the face of woe."

— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]nd what is more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius, or any Dutch logician or commentator."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgment are two luminaries and "their irradiations are suffered from time to time to shine down upon us."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Ideas "follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"His boasted reason seems only to light him astray, and brutal instinct more regularly points out the path to happiness."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Where, I again repeat it, is human reason! not only some men, but whole nations, seem divested of its illumination."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Reason cannot resolve. It lends a ray to shew the horrors of my prison, but not a light to guide me to escape them."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766

"We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and of the sun-shine in the mind unpolluted with guilt."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1763, 1767

"The guardian genius of his dawning thought, / Who wide disclos'd to wisdom's sacred ray / The eager inlets of his ample mind, / And pour'd upon each opening mental cell, / The virtue-forming scientific beam / With letter'd and religious radiance fill'd, / The fair expanses of his princely soul, ...

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)