1790s

Rights of Man · 1792

★ 7.3

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

Nonfiction · Biography

The Life of Samuel Johnson

James Boswell

1791 · 1408 pages

Boswell met Samuel Johnson, who had written the English dictionary, in 1763 and wrote down his talk for twenty years. Johnson steps off the page as somebody you have actually met.

★ 7.3

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

Symphony · Classical

London Symphonies

Joseph Haydn and Eugen Jochum

1795

Haydn was nearly sixty and had spent thirty years in a prince's service before a promoter took him to London, where he became famous overnight.

★ 7.3

Religious painting · Romanticism

The Ancient of Days

Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.

1794 · Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England

Blake's Urizen leans out of the sun with a golden compass to measure the void, and Blake was not sure whether to admire him.

★ 7.2

Speech

George Washington

1796

★ 7.1

No man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Mary Wollstonecraft

A Vindication of the Rights of Men · 1790

★ 7.1

Fiction · Philosophical novel

Jacques the Fatalist

Denis Diderot

1796 · 261 pages

Jacques and his master ride along while Jacques tries to tell his love story. Everyone interrupts, the narrator taunts you, and the interruptions become Diderot's case against free will.

★ 7.1

Mythological painting · Neoclassicism

The Intervention of the Sabine Women

Jacques Louis David

1799 · Louvre, Paris

Hersilia throws herself between the two armies with her arms out. David painted it after the Terror, arguing for reconciliation instead of oaths.

★ 7.1

Nonfiction · Political history

Reflections on the Revolution in France

1790 · 400 pages

Modern conservatism begins here, in Burke's fury at revolutionaries who tore down old institutions for the sake of an abstraction. Society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn.

★ 7.1

A state without some means of change is without the means of its own conservation.

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 7.0

Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

The most perfect of all works of art is true political freedom.

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 7.0

Treatise · Philosophical literature

Friedrich Schiller

1794

★ 7.0

Speech · Funeral oration

First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.

Henry Lee III

1799

★ 6.9

Fiction · Narrative poem

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1798 · 76 pages

Stopped outside a wedding, a guest must hear an old sailor out: he shot an albatross for no reason, and the ship fell becalmed with water everywhere and none to drink.

★ 6.8

Nonfiction · Autobiography and memoir

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

1790 · 441 pages

Seventeen and running from his apprenticeship, Franklin walks into Philadelphia carrying three bread rolls. He later ruled a daily chart of thirteen virtues, and every American self-improvement book works from that design.

★ 6.7

Letter

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.

Thomas Jefferson

1790

★ 6.3

Nonfiction · Philosophy

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Friedrich Schiller

1794 · 224 pages

Watching the French Revolution collapse into terror, Schiller concluded that reason cannot free people whose feelings stay uneducated. Beauty does it, through play, and Romanticism built its case for art on that claim.

★ 6.2

Nonfiction · Sociology

An Essay on the Principle of Population

T.R. Malthus

1798 · 172 pages

Population multiplies faster than food supply, Malthus argued, so misery and restraint are permanent conditions of human life, not problems reform can fix. Darwin read him and found natural selection.

★ 6.2

You will laugh when you learn that I thought nothing of deceiving idiots, scoundrels and fools when I needed to do so. As for my deceptions of women, these are not of the sort to be tallied, since when love has a hand in things, each party usually dupes the other.

Giacomo Casanova

Histoire de Ma Vie · 1791

★ 6.0

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1794

★ 5.5

For every thing that lives is Holy.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1794

★ 5.5

I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Songs of Experience · 1794

★ 5.5

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

Songs of Experience · 1794

★ 5.5

The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 5.5

Philosophical literature · Political literature

The American Constitutions were to Liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.

Philosophical literature · Political literature

Rights of Man · 1791

★ 5.4

I compare it to something behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when by an accident, the curtain happens to be opened, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.

Rights of Man · 1792

★ 5.4

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise.

1792

★ 5.4

Love to faults is always blind, Always is to joy inclin'd, Lawless, wing'd, and unconfin'd, And breaks all chains from every mind.

Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

1792

★ 5.4

Speech · Political speech

I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians, May 11, 1792 · 1792

★ 5.4

Pamphlet · Religious literature · Philosophical literature

The church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.

The Age of Reason · 1794

★ 5.4

Pamphlet · Religious literature · Philosophical literature

All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice.

The Age of Reason · 1794

★ 5.4

Jeremy Bentham

1795

★ 5.4

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days o' lang syne?

Robert Burns

Auld Lang Syne · 1796

★ 5.4

Play · Tragedy (play) · Tragedy

What's not forbidden to do make bold.

Friedrich Schiller

The Camp of Wallenstein · 1798

★ 5.4

Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?

William Wordsworth

Lines Written in Early Spring · 1798

★ 5.4

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth

The Table Turned · 1798

★ 5.4

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine, that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 5.3

If you trap the moment before it's ripe, The tears of repentance you'll certainly wipe; But if once you let the ripe moment go You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

1792

★ 5.3

Letter

John Adams

1798

★ 5.3

The best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of Love.

William Wordsworth

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey · 1798

★ 5.3

Whatever St. Augustine may say, human creatures would not perform the work of generation if they did not find pleasure in it, and if there was not in that great work an irresistible attraction for them.

Giacomo Casanova

Histoire de Ma Vie · 1791

★ 5.2

But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed, Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white - then melts for ever.

Robert Burns

Tam o' Shanter · 1791

★ 5.2

Soon shall thy arm, unconquere'd steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-chariot through the fields of air.

Erasmus Darwin

The Botanic Garden · 1791

★ 5.1

Scientific literature

Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the comencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which the Great First Cause endured with animality... And thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

Erasmus Darwin

Zoonomia · 1794

★ 5.1

Speech · Political speech

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

Fisher Ames

1795

★ 5.1

Political literature · Feminist literature

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

Mary Wollstonecraft

A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 4.7

Letter

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

1791

★ 4.6

Pamphlet · Religious literature · Philosophical literature

It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

The Age of Reason · 1794

★ 4.5

Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I have never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine, I have always loved it and done all I could to make myself loved by it.

Giacomo Casanova

Histoire de Ma Vie · 1791

★ 4.4

Genre painting · Folk art

The Old Plantation

John Rose

1795 · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg

Enslaved people dancing and making music beside their cabins, with African instruments and dress. Attributed to a South Carolina slaveholder.

★ 4.3

Fiction · Erotic fiction

Justine

Marquis de Sade

1791 · 336 pages

Twelve years old and orphaned, Justine chooses virtue and is punished for it by monks, surgeons, and noblemen who argue at length that nature rewards cruelty. Napoleon had Sade arrested for writing it.

★ 4.2

Fiction · Erotic fiction

Philosophy in the Boudoir

Marquis de Sade

1795 · 173 pages

Two libertines take a girl of fifteen through atheism, pleasure and cruelty, pausing for a pamphlet urging the Republic to abolish God with the king. Sade takes reason to its worst conclusion.

★ 4.2

Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.

Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin · 1790

★ 3.9

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.

Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin · 1790

★ 3.9