–Not that the phrase is at all to my liking: for to say a man is fallen in love,––or that he is deeply in love,––or up to the ears in love,––and sometimes even over head and ears in it,––carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:––this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,––I hold to be damnable and heretical:––and so much for that.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 450