Date: 1712

"What high Perfections grace the human Mind, / In Flesh imprison'd, and to Earth confin'd!"

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1712

"She [the mind] draws ten thousand Landschapes in the Brain, / Dresses of airy Forms an endless Train, / Which all her Intellectual Scenes prepare, / Enter by turns the Stage, and disappear."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1718

"The World a Scene of murder'd Souls appears, / Interr'd in living Sepulchres, / And moved from Place to Place in walking Tombs."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1718

"Vile Man becomes, when purify'd by Grace, / Thy Living Temple, and abiding Place."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1718

" His Heart is made Thy Altar, whence / To Heav'n arise pure Flames of holy Fire"

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1722

"[W]ho can tell / How each [image] awaken'd from its little cell / Starts forth, and how the soul's command it hears / And soon on fancy's theatre appears?"

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1723

"The Cells, and little Lodgings, Thou canst see / In Mem'ry's Hoards and secret Treasury; / Dost the dark Cave of each Idea spy, / And see'st how rang'd the crouded Lodgers lye; / How some, when beckon'd by the Soul, awake, / While peaceful Rest their uncall'd Neighbours take."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1760-7

"[I]n the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for [the biographer];--for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red hot iron,--must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

The gifts and endowments of wit and judgment may "be poured down warm as each of us could bear it,--scum and sediment an' all; (for I would not have a drop lost) into these veral receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormitories, refectories, and spare places of our brains,--in such sort, that...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgement are, like "two knobbs" on the back of a chair, "the highest and most ornamental parts of" and "both made and fitted to go together, in order as we say in all such cases of duplicated embellishments,--to answer one another."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)