No ambition, no largesse, no fear, no force, no man’s prestige could make me shift my stance when I was young: now that I’m old, do you see how easily I’m undone by the invitation—humble and mild—that issues from the merciful mind of the man who towers above us?

Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), pp. 176–7: see Austin Dobson, ed., Selected Poems of Goldsmith (1887), pp. 156–7; W. Below, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, Vol. 2 (1795), pp. 133–4; Richard Cumberland, The Observer, Vol. 2 (5th ed., 1798), pp. 248–50; John Dunlop, Charles Neaves and William E. Aytoun in Blackwood's Magazine (April 1838), pp. 551–3; Norbert Gutterman, A Book of Latin Quotations (1966), p. 79; Percival Vaughan Davies, The Saturnalia (Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 180