Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Thou look'st at me, as if thou fain would'st pry / Into my heart. 'Tis open as my speech."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Infernal fiends, if any fiends there are / More fierce than hate, ambition, and revenge, / Rise up and fill my bosom with your fires, / And policy remorseless!"

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Thy inspiration, Lord! / Hath fill'd his bosom with that sacred fire, / Which in the breasts of his forefathers burn'd."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"'Twas I! alas! 'twas I / That fill'd her breast with fury"

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Sadly he says, that pity is the best, / The noblest passion of the human breast: / For when its sacred streams the heart o'erflow, / In gushes pleasure with the tide of woe; / And when its waves retire, like those of Nile, / They leave behind them such a golden soil, / That there the virtues wit...

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: 1759

"His mind is continually occupied with what is too grand and solemn, to leave any room for the impressions of those frivolous objects, which fill up the attention of the dissipated and the gay."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"The soft, the amiable, the gentle virtues, all the virtues of indulgent humanity are in comparison but little insisted upon, and seem on the contrary, by the Stoics in particular, to have been often regarded as meer weaknesses which it behoved a wise man not to harbour in his breast."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1762

"In the latter passage, the most striking circumstances are selected to fill the mind with the grand and terrible. The former is a collection of minute and low circumstances, which scatter the thought and make no impression."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1762

"Grandeur and novelty fix the attention for a considerable time, excluding all other ideas; and the mind thus occupied feels no vacuity."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1762

"In such a state, the train of perceptions must not only be slow, but extremely uniform. Anger newly inflamed eagerly grasps its object, and leaves not a cranny in the mind for another thought than of revenge."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)