Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!†whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age† Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

-Arnold, Matthew
  Of Oxford. Essays in Criticism First Series, preface.

The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.

-Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The House of the Seven Gables, ch.12.

The old man puffed into sight like a venerable battlewagon pressing up over the horizon. First a smudge of smoke, then the long cigar, then the familiar, stoop-shouldered hulk that a generation has come to know as the silhouette of greatness.

-Time
  Of Winston Churchill disembarking from the Queen Mary. 14 Jan.