Date: 1766

"Every tender epithet bestowed on her sister brought a pang to her heart and a tear to her eye; and as one vice, tho' cured, ever plants others where it has been, so her former guilt, tho' driven out by repentance, left jealousy and envy behind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1771

"That is, let not great examples, or authorities, browbeat they reason into too great a diffidence fo thyself: thyself so reverence, as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."

— Author Unknown

Date: 1773

Toil and danger "feed and ripen minds" (not "meats and drinks" or "balmy airs, and vernal suns and showers")

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1778

"A thirst for knowledge, which can never be gratified, would not have been implanted; a mind which was to be chained to the earth, would never have been bent on the skies"

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1779, 1781

"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: w. September 1794, 1797

"Wit, that no suffering could impair, / Was thine, and thine whose mental powers / Of force to chase the fiends that tear / From Fancy's hands her budding flowers."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1799

"And, indeed, there is so much truth in the remark, that till women shall be more reasonably educated, and till the native growth of their mind shall cease to be stinted and cramped, we have no juster ground for pronouncing that their understanding has already reached its highest attainable point...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1817

"My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above the ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)