Trampling on Plato’s pride, with greater pride,
As did the Cynic on some like occasion, &c.
Byron, Don Juan, xvi. 43.
Diogenes I hold to be the most vainglorious man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors than Alexander in rejecting none.
Browne, Religio Medici.
There is an Italian proverb used, in the extravagance of flattery, to compliment a handsome lady, expressive of this idea:—“When nature made thee, she broke the mould.” Byron uses it in the closing lines of his monody on the death of Sheridan:—
Sighing that Nature formed but one such man,
And broke the die,—in moulding Sheridan.
Shakspeare also says, in the second stanza of Venus and Adonis,—