Anne Ford it was considered controversial for a woman to play the "masculine" viola da gamba, referred to at the time as the "viol di gambo". Ford gave a performance at Spring Gardens in 1761, "English airs". accompanying herself on the musical glasses. She also wrote a published work, "Instructions for Playing on the Musical Glasses". The instrument was comparable to the glass harp of Richard Pockrich consisting of individual glass goblets tuned with water, and preceded the 1761 mechanized armonica (Glass harmonica) invention of Benjamin Franklin and played by Marianne Davies. Ford's accomplishments risked being complicated by an infatuated lover, the
18th century in literature Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan". This was the first English translation directly from the Arabic original. Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Horace Walpole was born on 24 September 1717. Daniel Defoe was another political pamphleteer turned novelist like Jonathan Swift and was publishing in the early 18th century. In 1719, he published "Robinson Crusoe". Alexander Smith was a biographer who authored "A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen" (1719) which includes heavily fictionalised accounts of English criminals from the medieval period to