Date: 1753

"The nymph, whose passions nature had filled to the brim, could not hear such a rhapsody unmoved"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1755

"So eager and intangled was our Hidalgo in this kind of history, that he would often read from morning to night, and from night to morning again, without interruption; till at last, the moisture of his brain being quite exhausted with indefatigable watching and study, he fairly lost his wits."

— Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-1616); Smollett, Tobias (1721-1771)

Date: 1756, 1766

"In the softest, sweetest voice, she expressed herself, and without the least appearance of labour, her ideas seemed to flow from a vast fountain"

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1756, 1766

"[W]e go down with the current of the passions, and let bent and humour determine us, in opposition to what is decent and fit"

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1756, 1766

"This is beyond the reach of our conception. Imagination cannot plumb her line so low."

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1759

"Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient; every thing floated in their mind unconnected with the past or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds the circles of the first."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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

"Indeed there is one thing to be considered, that in Nova Zembla, North Lapland, and in all those cold and dreary tracts of the globe, which lie more directly under the artick and antartick circles,--where the whole province of a man's concernments lies for near nine months together, withi...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

The "small channels" of wit and judgment may "seem quite dried up,--then all of a sudden the sluices shall break out, and take a fit of running again like fury,--you would think they would never stop."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"What a cursed lyar! for I am sick as a horse, quoth I, already--what a brain!--upside down!--hey dey! the cells are broke loose one into another, and the blood, and the lymph, and the nervous juices, with the fix'd and volatile salts, are all jumbled into one mass--good g---! every thing turns r...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)