Date: 1778

"Our sense of right and wrong, proves that we are immortal--for we cannot suppose that the Almighty would have wantonly tortured us with stings of conscience, any more than he has, the beasts of the field, if we, like them, were to perish"

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: March, 1778

"An antient philosopher indeed, full of real or pretended honesty, declared it to be his wish that there were a window in his breast that every body might see the integrity and purity of his thoughts. It would be truly be very pretty and amusing if our bodies were transparent, so that we could se...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1778

The heart like a bird to its nestling will fly, / And when by the weight of a parent its bending, / Yet wishes while constant to break and to die. / Like a bird in a snare, of its freedom bereft, / Still hoping and wishing releasement again, / 'Till clos'd in the cage the flutterer is left / To p...

— Robertson, James (fl.1768-1788)

Date: 1773, 1778

"The Passions there embody'd throng, / On mental Pinions, swift, and strong, / In Robes array'd of various Fire."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1779

"Sorrow may well possess the mind / That feeds where thorns and thistles grow"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1779, 1781

"When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impr...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seld...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1780

"Behold the frantick passion how it burns, / Like a wild beast breaks every tie, / Laughs at the Priest; the Legislator spurns, / And gives both heaven and earth the lye!"

— Stevenson, John Hall (1717-1785)