John Wolcot

John Wolcot, by John Opie

John Wolcot (May 9, 1738 – January 14, 1819) was an English satirist who wrote under the nom-de-plume of "Peter Pindar".

Quotes

• What rage for fame attends both great and small!
  Better be damned than mentioned not at all.
  • To the Royal Academicians; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• No, let the monarch’s bags and others hold
  The flattering, mighty, nay, al-mighty gold.
  • To Kien Long; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Ode iv. Compare: "Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold,
    And almost every vice,—almighty gold", Ben Jonson, Epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland.

• Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt,
  And every grin so merry draws one out.
  • Expostulatory Odes, Ode xv; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• A fellow in a market town,
  Most musical, cried razors up and down.
  • Farewell Odes, Ode iii; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• People may have too much of a good thing:
  Full as an egg of wisdom thus I sing.
  • Subjects for Painters, The Gentleman and his Wife; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 617.