Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Our eyes shew us that the prospect is not present; our hearing, and our touch, depose against its reality; and our taste and smelling are equally vigilant in detecting the impostor."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"But in sleep it is otherwise; having, as much as possible, put our senses from their duty, having closed the eyes from seeing, and the ears, taste, and smelling, from their peculiar functions, and having diminished even the touch itself, by all the arts of softness, the imagination is then left ...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"As in madness, the senses, from struggling with the imagination, are at length forced to submit, so, in sleep, they seem for a while soothed into the like submission: the smallest violence exerted upon any one of them, however, rouzes all the rest in their mutual defence; and the imagination, th...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1775

"Our Author, who almost every where manifests a perfect knowledge in the anatomy of the human mind, proves his science more particularly in a passage of this Scene, by shewing a property in our natures which might have escaped any common dissecter of morals; and this is, our suffering, upon true ...

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"An evil conscience is a shrew, and gives most shocking curtain lectures."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"That this is the sense in which our Poet meant this scene to be accepted, is fully evident from his representing both Richard and Richmond to have been asleep during the apparition, and therefore capable of receiving those notices in the mind's eye only, as Hamlet says; which intirely removes th...

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"Body may be overcome by body, but the mind only can conquer itself."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"We do not, indeed, feel our minds impressed with such a tender sensibility towards the latter, as the first."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)