Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book 6
Harold Edgeworth Butler, Ed.

[10] For his gifts were not merely in the bud like those of his brother: as early as his ninth birthday he had put forth sure and well-formed fruit. By my own sorrows, by the testimony of my own sad heart, by his departed spirit, the deity at whose shrine my grief does worship, I swear that I discerned in him such talent, not merely in receiving instruction, although in all my wide experience I have never seen his like, nor in his power of spontaneous application, to which his [p. 379] teachers can bear witness, but such upright, pious, humane and generous feelings, as alone might have sufficed to fill me with the dread of the fearful thunder-stroke that has smitten me down: for it is a matter of common observation that those who ripen early die young, and that there is some malign influence that delights in cutting short the greatest promise and refusing to permit our joys to pass beyond the bound allotted to mortal man.