Date: 1751

"Tears gushing again, my heart fluttering as a bird against its wires; drying my eyes again and again to no purpose."

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1751

"[H]is heart was shod with a metal much harder than iron, which he was afraid nothing but hell-fire would be able to melt."

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1754

"The character of a candid enquirer is very commendable; for in his search whatever he finds he immediately acknowledges; he gives his judgment liberty to exert itself, and restrains his imagination from soaring beyond its strength, and from declaring that he hath found what is not."

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"I found I had given a loose to a passion which had no other end but to make me frantic, and consequently miserable; and yet insupportable as my life was, and altho' the alteration of Eustace had taken from me the gratification of this whirlwind of passion, yet was I caught in such a snare...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"But this consuming flame arises first in its own breast; and, let him roam where he will, such a man, like the poor wounded stag, still carries the arrow sticking in his heart"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"But this consuming flame arises first in its own breast; and, let him roam where he will, such a man, like the poor wounded stag, still carries the arrow sticking in his heart; or rather like a mad dog, enraged with his own misery, endeavours to bite and poison, with his own venomous foam, every...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"Most rightly have ye judged, O ye Cry; for the turba, ever watchful for an opportunity to invest the human mind, no sooner discovered an unguarded moment, than, like a nest of hornets arm'd with all their stings, they enter'd my once peaceful bosom."

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"Those inimitably beautiful chorus's to Shakespear's Harry the fifth, where he desires his audience to play with their fancies, and to suffer him to bear them on the lofty wings of his own sublime imagination, over the expanded ocean to different countries and distant climates, we should have tho...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1756, 1766

"Whether the learned Dr. Edmund Law, and the great Dr. Sherlock bishop of London, be right, in asserting, the human soul sleeps like a bat or a swallow, in some cavern for a period, till the last trumpet awakens the hero of Voltaire and Henault, I mean Lewis XIV."

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1759

"[S]he had no Food from outward Objects, to employ her animal Spirits, and they therefore prey'd at home; and oppressed her own Mind."

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)