Hypotheses non fingo:

I do not invent hypotheses.

Isaac Newton

'And all the men and women merely players'...

We are placed in this world, as in great theatre, where the sources and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspence between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable.

David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Weather Report

Holland is no more at present than a great leaky Man of War, tossing on the Ocean, and Mariners are forc'd to pump Night and Day to keep the Vessel above Water. I can assure you, without a Jest, that the Cellars and Canals have frequent Communication, and happy is he that can lodge in a Garret: There are Fellows planted on all the Steeples, with a considerable Reward to him that can make the first Land, tho' they had more Need to look out for a Rainbow; for without that I shall believe that God Almighty, in his Articles with Noah after the Flood, has excluded the Dutch out of the Treaty.

George Farquhar, letter from the Hague

Porn Budget:

£4.00 per annum

"You must be vastly mistaken in the article of £4 a year to C---l.* That had certainly been a properer article of my estimate; for the batchelor never gratifies his passion, but when nature of its own accord dictates; but when married, and it becomes an expected duty, there will, to preserve peace at home, be a greater occasion to have recourse to luscious books, to raise that passion, that by frequent repitition, and with the same object, would otherwise grow faint and languid."

Edward Ward - response to a critic of his Batchelor's Advocate

in his later book None but Fools Marry (1730)

*Edmund Curll was a publisher and bookseller, notorious for hack-work, literary piracy and pornography. He was attacked in print, most famously by Alexander Pope, imprisoned and even pilloried; but in the stocks was cheered rather than attacked by the mob, and when released was carried off on their shoulders.

Household economy:

Madam's pocket expenses throughout the year, for waterage, coach-hire, chair-hire, for visiting, and for going to operas, balls, plays, concerts, publick shews and spectacles, publick feasts,Vauxhall, Ranelagh, &c.

30 pounds

From: The Batchelor's Advocate: being, a Modest Estimate of the Expences attending the Married Life, Edward Ward 1729

The THIEF-TAKER:

'... he was a scandalous Person, a Thief-Taker... his House was a common receptacle for Thieves and Pick-Pockets.'

JACK will ever make a Gentleman:

This Proverb teaches, that every one will not make a Gentleman, that is vulgarly called so, now-a days: There is more than the bare Name required, to the making him what he ought to be by Birth, Honour and Merit: For let a Man get never so much Money to but an Estate, he cannot purchase one Grain of GENTILITY with it, but will remain JACK in the Proverb still, without Learning, Virtue, and Wisdom, to enrich the Faculties of the Mind, to inhance the Glory of his Wealth, and to ennoble the Blood; for put him into what Circumstance you please, he will discover himself one Time or other, in Point of Behaviour, to be of a mean Extract, awkward, ungenteel, and ungenerous, a Gentleman at Second-hand only, or a vain-gloious Upstart: For you cannot make a silken Purse of a Sow's Ear; Ex quovis ligno Mercurius non fit, say the Latins.

Nathan Bailey, Dictionary of Proverbs 1721

The Debtors' Prison

"For debt only are men condemned to languish in perpetual imprisonment, and to starve without mercy, redeemed only by the grave. Kings show mercy to traitors, to murderers and thieves... but in debt we are lost to this world. We cannot obtain the favour of being hanged or transported, but our lives must linger within the walls, till released by the grave."

Daniel Defoe, bankrupted in 1692 with debts of £17,000 incurred in his trade as a merchant. He was jailed numerous times for debt, once for four months.

The Writers' Code:

[A man] should write so as he may live by [his labours], not so as he may be knocked on the head. I would advise him to be at Calais before he publishes.

Samuel Johnson