Date: 1760-7

"With the best intelligence which all these messengers [his animal spirits] could bring him back, Phutatorius was not able to dive into the secret of what was going forwards below, nor could he make any kind of conjecture, what the devil was the matter with it."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: w. May, 1756; 1761

"For these, if I forget my patron's praise, / While bright ideas dance upon my mind, / Ne'er may these eyes behold auspicious days, / May friends prove faithless, and the Muse unkind."

— Fawkes, Francis (1720-1777)

Date: 1762-3

"(Good Gravity! forbear thy spleen, / When I say wit, I wisdom mean) / Where, (such the practice of the court, / Which legal precedents support) / Not one idea is allow'd / To pass unquestion'd in the crowd, / But ere it can obtain the grace / Of holding in the brain a place, / Before the chief i...

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1763

"No--'tis the tale which angry Conscience tells, / When She with more than tragic horror swells / Each circumstance of guilt; when stern, but true, / She brings bad actions forth into review; / And, like the dread hand-writing on the wall, / Bids late Remorse awake at Reason's call, / Arm'd at al...

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1763

"This tender, this exquisite affection, has diffused a spirit through our whole lives, and given a charm to the most common occurrences; a charm to which the dulness of apathy, and the fever of guilty passion, are equally strangers."

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: 1764

"Have I well weigh'd the great, the noble part / I'm now to play? have I explored my heart, / That labyrinth of fraud, that deep, dark cell, / Where, unsuspected, e'en by me, may dwell / Ten thousand follies?"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1764

"[I]n his breast, / Crowded with follies, Honour found no room"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1765

"O God, to what a pitch are wrought / The councils of omniscient thought."

— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)

Date: 1768

"Every dirty passion, and bad propensity in my nature, took the alarm, as I stated the proposition."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1769

"The first moment I saw Colonel Rivers convinced me my heart had till then been a stranger to true tenderness"

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)