"Dotage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conviction, "the fiction of the law, which admitted the application of the royal political authority, when the personal was disabled, as implicated in the very principles of hereditary succession, which otherwise would suffer interruption from nonage, infirmity, dotage, and every contingency in the state of man." Sheridan spoke very ill: very hot, injudicious, and ill-heard. Rolle, whilst adverting to Sheridan's speech, made use of a remarkable expression, and which seems to hint some future acting up to the rumours ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... been in his dotage, which he was not, my answer would have been a more triumphant one. For when was dotage consistently and imaginatively inventive? But why should I not believe the story? There are people who can never believe anything that is not (I do not say merely in accordance with ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... her father, the object of her greatest, her only youthful affection; then she had married. The child had come, with its thrice welcome demands upon her every moment. Moreover, she had with her her mother, almost in her dotage, still stupefied by her husband's tragic death. In a life so fully occupied, Sidonie's caprices received but little attention; and it had hardly occurred to Claire Fromont to be surprised at her marriage to Risler. He was clearly ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... conversing at the Club Which Londoners with 'GARRICK'S' title dub, We both confessed, and each with equal grief, That poor Melpomene was past relief; So many symptoms of her dotage shows This nineteenth century of steam and prose. Nor in herself, said you, entirely lies Th' incurable complaint whereof she dies; 'Tis not alone that play-wrights are too poor For gods or men or columns to endure;[4] Nor that all players ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... within the very narrow restrictions laid down by the social code of La Chatre was, it must be owned, hardly to be expected. It was perhaps premature to throw down the gauntlet at sixteen, but her inexperience and isolation were complete. The grandmother in her dotage was no counsellor at all. Deschartres, an oddity himself, cared for none of these things. Those best acquainted with her at La Chatre, families the heads of which had known her father well and whose younger members had fraternized with her from childhood upwards, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Aminta partially a topic; and so ready was he to follow her lead in the veriest trifles recalling the handsome runaway; that she had to excite his racy diatribes against the burgess English and the pulp they have made of a glorious nation, in order not to think him inclining upon dotage. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nothing battling for the Red Branch; and I would not, even for Deirdre, war upon my comrades. But Deirdre I will not leave nor forget for a thousand prophecies made by the Druids in their dotage. If the Red Branch must fall, it will fall through treachery; but Deirdre I will love, and in my love is no dishonor, ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... indeed, there were few left for her to give it to. The Herritons were out of the question; they would not even let her write to Irma, though Irma was occasionally allowed to write to her. Mrs. Theobald was rapidly subsiding into dotage, and, as far as she could be definite about anything, had definitely sided with the Herritons. And Miss Abbott did likewise. Night after night did Lilia curse this false friend, who had agreed with her that the marriage would "do," and that the Herritons would come ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... she. "You look at that lean figure, and the wizened-up old hawk's face, with the white hair all round it, and you'd think that he was in his dotage. But when he talks—I ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... of not always well-informed argument, that importance is pretty generally allowed by the competent. It has, fortunately, ceased to be fashionable to regard the dispute about Universals as proper only to amuse childhood or beguile dotage, and the quarrels of Scotists and Thomists as mere reductions of barren logomachy to the flatly absurd. Still, this importance, though real, though great, is not directly literary. The claim which makes it impossible to pass them over here is that excellently put in the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... that his learned brother Counsel, Mr. Gentle Gammon, had so far forgotten his professional dignity as to declare that this Lion actually moved and spoke at times. He feared, and also he lamented, that his learned brother must be approaching his dotage. Yet in order to satisfy each and every one in Court, he, Mr. Dreadful, had sent an urgent and special messenger for a first-class veterinary surgeon, having the letters M.R.C.V.S. after his name, and also for one of the keepers belonging to ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... this plan would revolutionise the world. It would make statesmen hurry up. At present, they are nearly fifty before you hear of them. How can we expect the country to be properly governed by men in their dotage? ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... rest of your family," I shouted: "ignorant, thoughtless, brutal en venerie, sanctimonious in dotage. I know few people for whom I have so great a detestation as for the Royal Saxons. Look at your father, there is no more jesuitical a Jesuit, the inward man as hideous as the outward. He would be an insolent lackey, if he didn't happen to be ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... interested in everything that concerns him. I will tell you another secret, Mary. I think I am getting into my dotage, my dear, or I should hardly talk to you like this,' said Lady Maulevrier, with ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... it? I feel"—sarcastically—"like going into fits myself when I think of it, it is so screamingly absurd. And how it happened I can't tell you, unless it is that we are fallen into our dotage. I ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... monotonous quiet, which was broken at last for Hagar by the startling announcement that her daughter's young mistress had died four months before, and the husband, a gray-haired, elderly man, had proved conclusively that he was in his dotage by talking of marriage to Hester, who, ere the letter reached her mother, would probably be the third bride of one whose reputed wealth was the only possible inducement to ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... [this lord of weak remembrance] This lord, who, being now in his dotage, has outlived his faculty of remembering; and who, once laid in the ground, shall be as little remembered himself, as he can now ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... than any of your modern professors. All such propositions are old—old as the hills, I assure you; and these days in which you live are more suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of Shakespeare. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... whether there was any one trait of Miss Petowker left in Mrs Lillyvick, and finding too surely that there was not, begged pardon of all the company with great humility, and sat down such a crest-fallen, dispirited, disenchanted man, that despite all his selfishness and dotage, he was quite an object ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... fell into a dotage of love for a damsel of the Lady of the Lake, and would let her have no rest, but followed her in every place. And ever she encouraged him, and made him welcome till she had learned all his crafts that she ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... sans-peer! believe not the words of this youth. Of a surety none murdered the damsel but I; take her wreak on me this moment; for, an thou do not thus, I will require it of thee before Almighty Allah." Then quoth the young man, "O Wazir, this is an old man in his dotage who wotteth not whatso he saith ever, and I am he who murdered her, so do thou avenge her on me!" Quoth the old man, "O my son, thou art young and desirest the joys of the world and I am old and weary and surfeited with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... married. The wife of the proprietor desiring to share a knighthood with her husband, the proprietor, anxious to please but unwilling to pay, incontinently sacked the tame editor who was beguiling an amiable dotage with the County Times and looked about for a wild editor, whom unquestionably he found in ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope. Hence, even wise decisions—wise under the particular circumstances and times—degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation. Hence errors became like glaciers, or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... sorry to offend, or that any should mistake my honest meaning: for I wish good to all, hurt to none; but rich men for the most part are grown to that dotage through their pride in their wealth, as though there were no accident could end ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... jolly, but was in his physical and spiritual dotage, yet "Nell," his second wife, was the life of the place, being immensely popular with the Oxford students, who circled about the "Crown" in midnight hours, with hilarious independence, that defied the raids of beadles, watchmen ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... you, personally, sweet girl; he knows nothing, suspects nothing of my preferences—how should he? No, dearest girl—his notion that I must have a moneyed bride is the merest whim of dotage; we must forgive the whims of ninety-five. That great age also augurs for us a short ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... comfort was found in Elspeth—no help. Surely the woman was in her dotage. Fool! Why did the feckless old idiot not know that the dog must have been mad? The man was drinking heavily now, goaded by grim terror of that very thing, and sodden with drink. Body and soul the old nurse was hers, she believed. Then, what so easy to make ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... from moving, but unable to keep itself from moving along with the mass. Nor was the effect of the discussions and speculations of that period confined to our own country. While the Jacobite party was in the last dotage and weakness of its paralytic old age, the political philosophy of England began to produce a mighty effect on France, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... company. Shakespeare's piece is a penetrating study of political life, and, although the murder and funeral of Caesar form the central episode and not the climax, the tragedy is thoroughly well planned and balanced. Caesar is ironically depicted in his dotage. The characters of Brutus, Antony, and Cassius, the real heroes of the action, are exhibited with faultless art. The fifth act, which presents the battle of Philippi in progress, proves ineffective on the stage, but the reader never relaxes ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Cayley, in his European Revolutions of 1848, "on the dismissal of the King's mistress. She was sent away, but, trusting to the King's dotage, she came back, police or no police.... This was a climax to which the people were unprepared to submit, not that they were any more virtuous than their Sovereign." Another publicist, Edward Maurice, puts it a little differently: "In Bavaria the power exercised by Lola Montez over Ludwig ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... he! ho, ho, ho!" laughed Keane. "Why, Richards, you're in your dotage, man! I've a baronet in view for Gerty. And Jack is a beggar, although he does swing a sword at his side ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... when sixty years were o'er, He vow'd to lead this vicious life no more; 10 Whether pure holiness inspired his mind, Or dotage turn'd his brain, is hard to find; But his high courage prick'd him forth to wed, And try the pleasures of a lawful bed. This was his nightly dream, his daily care, And to the heavenly powers his constant prayer, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... was that South Carolina was determined to have Fort Sumter at all hazards; that they would pull it down with their finger-nails, if they could not get it in any other way; that the other Southern States were becoming excited on the subject; that President Buchanan was in his dotage; that the government in Washington was breaking up; that all was confusion, despair, and disorder there; and that it was full time for us to look out for our own safety, for if we refused to give up the fort nothing could prevent the Southern ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... coarse, large coin—about fifteen guineas, in five-franc pieces. She loved this hoard as a bird loves its eggs. These were her savings. She would come and talk to me about them with an infatuated and persevering dotage, strange to behold in a person not ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and views of the House, &c. This, with the small news of my country, crops and prices, furnish you abundant matter to treat me, while I have nothing to give you in return, but the history of the follies of nations in their dotage. Present me in respectful and friendly terms to Mrs. Monroe, and be assured of the sincere sentiments of esteem and attachment, with which I am Dear ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... on long enough, but her master exclaimed to his daughter, who was still in her own apartment: "It is nonsense, Catharine—all the dotage of an old fool. No such thing has happened. I will bring you the true tidings in a moment," and snatching up his staff, the old man hurried out past Dorothy and into the street, where the throng of people were rushing towards the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... a strange thing happened. When we had taken my grandfather to the Hall in June, his dotage seemed to settle upon him. He became a trembling old man, at times so peevish that we were obliged to summon with an effort what he had been. He was suspicious and fault-finding with Scipio and the other servants, though they were never so busy for his wants. Mrs. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... impulse to the Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is true, indeed, that unknown mediaeval carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The facades of Lombard churches ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... explanation seemed utterly ridiculous to Captain Sproul, to his seamen, and even to Phineas Roebach. They were convinced that Professor Henderson was in his dotage. They would rather believe that the Orion, sailing on pretty nearly a straight course according to the compass, had traversed this enormous ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... his dotage!" thinks Brian, disgustedly; and, rising from the table, he makes a few more trivial remarks, and then walks from the dining-room on to the balcony and so to ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... Platte,—whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the geologist,—whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of California and the Pacific Sea. Between Green River and the Mormon city no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day's stage-ride east of the city, is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... now,' replied ALMORAN, 'to hear the paradoxes of thy philosophy explained: but to shew thee, that I fear not thy power, thou shalt live. I will leave thee to hopeless regret; to wiles that have been scorned and defeated; to the unheeded petulance of dotage; to the fondness that is repayed with neglect; to restless wishes, to credulous hopes, and to derided command: to the slow and complicated torture of despised old age; and that, when thou shalt long have abhorred thy ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... is usually called dotage is not the weak point of all old men, but only of such as are distinguished ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... which turned into a shower so soft and piercing, I almost died to see it; at last delivering me a paper—'Here,' (cried he, with a sigh and trembling-interrupted voice) 'read what I cannot tell thee. Oh, Sylvia,' cried he, '—thou joy and hope of all my aged years, thou object of my dotage, how hast thou brought me to my grave with sorrow!' So left me with the paper in my hand: speechless, unmov'd a while I stood, till he awaked me by new sighs and cries; for passing through my chamber, by chance, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... his wisdom in regard to that marriage. But the very genteel progeny of his early youth were more than ever dissatisfied, and in their letters among themselves dealt forth harder and still harder words upon poor Sir Joseph. What terrible things might he not be expected to do now that his dotage was coming on? Those three married ladies had no selfish fears—so at least they declared, but they united in imploring their brother to look after his interests at Orley Farm. How dreadfully would the young heir of Groby be curtailed in his dignities and seignories if it ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... unexpectedly and unattended in the dip by the lane, Tammas and the Master, summoned hurriedly by Owd Bob, came running up to find the little man leaning against the stile, and shaking with silent merriment. Again, poor old Staggy, daring still in his dotage, took a fall while scrambling on the steep banks of the Stony Bottom. There he lay for hours, unnoticed and kicking, until James Moore and Owd Bob came upon him at length, nearly exhausted. But M'Adam was before them. Standing on the far bank with Red Wull by his side, ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... going where he will be fed and get strength. I trust it does not seem flippant to say that I look on all church organizations in the same way, and that the tradition of a long past suggests to me the inefficiency of a dotage, quite as much as the stimulating aroma of potency which, as in the case of some wines, can only be acquired by the lapse of time. Some will say that this Modernism has no sense of obligation, no sense of veneration, makes no allowance for the idiosyncrasies of others. Well, that may be so. I ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... Larry; "where did ye larn English, boy, for ye have the brogue parfict, as me gran'mother used to say to the pig when she got in her dotage (me gran'mother, not the pig), 'only,' says she, 'the words isn't quite distinc'.' Couldn't ye give us a ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... to what a degree I am become helpless; nothing can account for it but extreme dotage, or extreme infancy. I wish Barthow had left Lady Caroline, and was here only to dress me in warmer clothes, but she goes from here, I hear, to Lady Ailesford, so that I must not think of lying in and being nursed for ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... there, and the clouds appear to be of the same commonplace order that go about everywhere. Seventhly, no one can find these footpaths, which probably led nowhere; and as for the little old man with silver buckles on his shoes, it is a story only fit for some one in his dotage. You can't expect grave and considerate men to take your story as it stands; they must consult the Ordnance Survey and Domesday Book; and the fact is, you have not got the shadow of a foundation ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the skull and earth are vanished. This is beyond melancholy. I do dare my fate To do its worst. Now to my sister's lodging And sum up all these horrors: the disgrace The prince threw on me; next the piteous sight Of my dead brother; and my mother's dotage; And last this terrible vision: all these Shall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good, Or I will drown ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to the men of to-day from the vantage point of extreme old age. Age is so frequently dotage, that when a veteran appears who preserves the heart of a boy and the happy audacity of youth, under the 'lyart haffets wearing thin and bare' of aged manhood, it seems as if there is something supernatural about it, and all men feel the fascination and the charm. Mr. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... deep drawer full of miscellaneous garments, mumbling to himself all the while. I stood beside him in silence, pondering on his words, "Thou art OLD, but merry." What did he mean by calling ME old? He must be blind, I thought, or in his dotage. Suddenly ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... found him in his dotage, and the bursar of Hyde made quick work with us, for fear, good Father Shoveller said, that we were come to look ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... huts, built on piles over the water, and forming a gigantic crescent on either bank of the broad, curving stream. This is the city of Brunai, the capital of the Yang di Pertuan, the Sultan of Brunai, aetat one hundred or more, and now in his dotage: the abode of some 15,000 Malays, whose language is as different from the Singapore Malay as Cornish is from Cockney English, and the coign of vantage from which a set of effete and corrupt Pangerans ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... him with their families. Each brings his share of drink and provisions, and returning home they sing in chorus the same songs. So long as this state of things endures, a man is not induced to sacrifice the best years of his life to win a fortune for his dotage. His tastes, and, more to the point still, his wife's, remain inexpensive. He likes to see his flat or villa furnished with much red plush upholstery and a profusion of gilt and lacquer. But that is his idea; and maybe it is in ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... especially dotage, is for a relapse to the infantile state when all playthings were held in common. And this wisest of all places (in its own opinion) had a certain eccentric inclination towards the poetic perfection when it will be impossible ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... with his antecedents and with hers, his friends and acquaintances became alarmed for the result, and not without cause. "Her influence over him exceeds all belief," wrote a mutual friend to Greville in March, 1791. "His attachment exceeds admiration, it is perfect dotage." Shortly after this letter was written the two went to England, and there they were married on the 6th of September, 1791. By the end of the year they were back in Naples, and did not again leave Italy up to the time of Nelson's ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... to the mill. To these evils this one is besides added for me. This Andrian, whether she is {his} wife, or whether {his} mistress, is pregnant by Pamphilus. It is worth while to hear their effrontery; for it is an undertaking {worthy} of those in their dotage, not of those who dote in love;[41] whatever she shall bring forth, they have resolved to rear;[42] and they are now contriving among themselves a certain scheme, that she is a citizen of Attica. There was formerly a certain old ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Braving the cry. O the Vanity and self-dotage of Authors! I, yet, after a reperusal of the preceding Apol. Preface, now some 20 years since its first publication, dare deliver it as my own judgement that both in style and thought it is a work creditable to the head and heart of the Author, tho' he happens to have been the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bringing desolation ... on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe, domestic, but an unexpected and common calamity—would lay his carcase in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his drivelling sexagenary dotage had not the courage to survive his Nurse—for what else was a wife to him at his time of life?)—reflect or consider what my feelings must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... able-bodied man cannot take a babe as the sole companion of his existence. Probably Geoffrey would have found this out in time, and might have drifted into some mode of life more or less undesirable, had not an accident occurred to prevent it. In his dotage, Geoffrey's old uncle Sir Robert Bingham fell a victim to the wiles of an adventuress and married her. Then he promptly died, and eight months afterwards a posthumous son ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... of space and time do not control his perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them at the same time. Physical existence has its cumulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachani than she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far more real bliss and happiness there than she does here, where all the conditions of evil and chance are against ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... as a leap in the dark; but for my part, I look on it as a welcome resting place, where virtuous old age may throw down his pains and aches, wipe off his old scores, and begin anew on an innocent and happy state that shall last for ever. What weakness to wish to live to such ghastly dotage, as to frighten the children, and make even the dogs to bark at us as we totter along the streets. Most certainly then, there is a time when, to a good man, death is a great mercy even to his body; ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... small country was being put upon. Then John would come up and say, 'Let him alone, will yer.' A laughing-stock in his old age. But yesterday he might have stood before the world: now none so poor to do him reverence,—Shakespeare! That's what's coming. Poor old Bull! In his dotage making a rod to ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... much as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man's act of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... is throwne on him. Call, oh call to minde His service, how often he hath fought And toyl'd in warres to give his Country peace. He has not beene a flatterer of the Time, Nor Courted great ones for their glorious Vices; He hath not sooth'd blinde dotage in the World, Nor caper'd on the Common-wealths dishonour; He has not peeld the rich nor flead the poore, Nor from the heart-strings of the Commons drawne Profit to his owne Coffers; he never brib'd The white intents of mercy; never sold Iustice for money, to set ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... decay of body is half so miserable." The most audacious hypocrite of fiction pales beside this. Pope, condescending to the meanest complication of lies to justify a paltry vanity, taking advantage of his old friend's dotage to trick him into complicity, then giving a false account of his error, and finally moralizing, with all the airs of philosophic charity, and taking credit for his generosity, is altogether a picture to set fiction ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... abominable huts, with patches of garden ground filled up the space inclosed by the gorgeous ramparts and massive towers of Semendria. The further we walked the nobler appeared the last relic of the dotage of old feudal Servia. In one of the towers next the Danube is a sculptured Roman tombstone. One graceful figure points to a sarcophagus, close to which a female sits in tears; in a word, a remnant of the antique—of that harmony which dies not away, ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... would have been about Frank's age. And," continued the housekeeper, "I might as well speak plainly. You're my master's heir, or ought to be; but if this artful boy stays here long, there's no knowing what your uncle may be influenced to do. If he gets into his dotage, he may come to adopt him, and leave the property ...
— The Cash Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... Of the Church, will teach you better thoughts. And Signiors, You that are Batchelours, if you ever marry, In Bartolus you may behold the issue Of Covetousness and Jealousie; and of dotage, And falshood in Don Henrique: keep a mean then; For be assured, that weak man meets all ill, That gives himself up ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... capitally, making full use of the talent of mimicry she had inherited with her Italian blood; she had no mercy on her soft voice or her lovely face, and when she had to represent some old crone in her dotage, or a stupid burgomaster, she made the drollest grimaces, screwing up her eyes, wrinkling up her nose, lisping, squeaking.... She did not herself laugh during the reading; but when her audience (with ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... and ears and some experience in human nature." Saunders puffed at his cigar. He felt that his friend was expecting what he was saying. "Mitchell is getting in his dotage, and he talks very ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... general weakness of old people; I have had a twitch of it myself, though certainly it is the highest absurdity, and as sure a proof of dotage as pink-coloured ribands, or even matrimony. Nay, perhaps, there is more to be said in defence of the last; I mean in a childless old man; he may prefer a boy born in his own house, though he knows ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... an asylum, wouldn't you? But just consider what an awful condition of loneliness that poor wretch must be in by this time. You think I've been more alone than's good for me; think of him, shut up with an old woman in her dotage. He was awfully cut up about this affair of old Cameron and the girl, and he is losing all his winter's lumbering for want of a man. Now, there's a fix, if you will, where I say a man ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... old, and should only breed it up to be unhappy when I am gone. My resource is in two marble kittens that Mrs Damer has given me, of her own work, and which are so much alive that I talk to them, as I did to poor Tonton! If this is being superannuated, no matter; when dotage can amuse itself it ceases to be an evil. I fear my marble playfellows are better adapted to me, than I am to being your ladyship's correspondent." Poor Tonton was left to Walpole by "poor dear Madame de Deffand." In a letter ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... government is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds. Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. It signifies not what their mental or moral characters are. Monarchical government appears under all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage; a thing at nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government than hereditary succession. By continuing this absurdity, man is perpetually in contradiction with himself; he may accept for a king, or a chief magistrate, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the stories of Horace Walpole are to be received with great caution; but his Reminiscences, above all, written in his dotage, teem with the grossest inaccuracies and incredible assertions." LORD MAHON'S History of England. Lond. 1837. ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... died raving under the sentence; McKenzie died with blood flowing from many parts of his body; the Duke of Monmouth was executed; Dalziel died while drinking, without a moment of warning; Lauderdale sank into dotage through excessive indulgence; the Duke of Rothes passed into eternity in despair. The prophecy had its terrible fulfilment, to the last man. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... "This is folly—dotage;" said Ellinor, indignantly: "Surely there are others, as brave, as gentle, as kind, and if not so wise, yet more fitted ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... since he married and founded that mysterious thing, a family, came this warning thought—None of his blood, no right to anything! It was a luxury then, this notion. An extravagance, a petting of an old man's whim, one of those things done in dotage. His real future was vested in those who had his blood, in whom he would live on when he was gone. He turned away from the bronzes and stood looking at the old leather chair in which he had sat and smoked so many ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for them! I have thousands of acres, hundreds of tenants, farms, sugar-bushes, manufactories for pearl-ash, grist-mills, saw-mills, and I'm damned if I draw sword either way! Am I a madman, to risk all this? Am I a common fool, to chance anything now? Do they think me in my dotage? Indeed, sir, if I drew blade, if I as much as raised a finger, both sides would come swarming all over us—rebels a-looting and a-shooting, Indians whooping off my cattle, firing my barns, scalping my tenants—rebels at heart every one, and I'd not care tuppence ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... to shun th' inglorious stage, And save from infamy my sinking age! Scarce half alive, oppress'd with many a year, What in the name of dotage drives me here? A time there was, when glory was my guide, 5 Nor force nor fraud could turn my steps aside; Unaw'd by pow'r, and unappall'd by fear, With honest thrift I held my honour dear; But this vile hour disperses all my store, And all my hoard of honour is no more. 10 For ah! too partial ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... and Lord de Versely as to your mother's death, you have deceived them in everything else, and that she does not now believe that you are the son of her nephew. As I hinted before, the old lady is almost in her dotage, and cannot well be reasoned with, for she is very positive. I argued as long as I could with her, but in vain. At last she consented to stop proceedings until I heard from you, saying, 'If I can have any proof under my nephew's ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... him great deference, and occasionally styles him "Monseigneur" and "Altesse Royal." As if this hint were not sufficient, it is incidentally mentioned that a very aged Highland chief, who is almost in his dotage, no sooner set eyes upon the "Red Eagle" than he addressed him as Prince Charlie, and told his royal highness that the last time he saw him was on the ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... befell his Valour," he replied. "He was suffocated by the smoke from the hearth, like a dog. There is no great loss in him, for he was in his dotage." ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... of Johnson, and that he had written them under Stowell's dictation. Sir Walter Scott wanted to see them, and Croker sent them to him in Scotland by the post. The bag was lost; no tidings could be heard of it, Croker had no copy, and Stowell is in his dotage and can't be got to dictate again. So much for the anecdote; then comes the story. I said how surprising this was, for nothing was so rare as a miscarriage by the post. He said, 'Not at all, for I myself lost two reviews in the same way. I sent them both to Brougham to forward to Jeffrey ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... in its day of peril dark Wont to believe the dotage of fond love From the fair Cyprian deity, who rolls In her third epicycle, shed on men By stream of potent radiance: therefore they Of elder time, in their old error blind, Not her alone with sacrifice ador'd And invocation, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... lonely dancer entering from the court, large, weary, crowned with gold, tufted with feathers, wrinkled, with greedy, fatigued eyes, and hands painted blood-red. She was like an idol in its dotage. Over her spreading bosom streamed multitudes of golden coins, and many jewels shone upon her wrists, her arms, her withered neck. She advanced slowly, as if bored, until she was in the midst of the crowd. ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... he assumes that humanity can only achieve its mission through struggle and strife, through sacrifice and heroism. It is true that Bernhardi ignores the greatest of Prussian philosophers, whose immortal plea in favour of perpetual peace is dismissed as the work of his dotage. But if he dismisses Kant, he adduces instead a formidable array of thinkers and poets in support of his militarist thesis; Schiller and Goethe, Hegel and Heraclitus, in turn are summoned as authorities. Even the Gospels ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... down everything that is not like itself—mere froth and scum. And unlike our great classic teachers who held that old age was honourable and deserved the highest place in the senate, the present generation affects to consider a man well on the way to dotage after forty. God bless me!—what fools there are in this twentieth century!—what blatant idiots! Imagine national affairs carried on in the country by its young men! The Empire would soon became a mere football for general kicking! However, there's one thing in this Helmsley ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... needy gallants in the scrivener's hands, Court the rich knave that gripes their mortgaged lands, The first fat buck of all the season's sent, And keeper takes no fee in compliment: The dotage of some Englishmen is such, To fawn on those who ruin them—the Dutch. They shall have all, rather than make a war With those who of the same religion are. The Straits, the Guinea trade, the herrings too, Nay, to keep friendship, they shall pickle you. 10 ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... him, Before the Areopagus, of dotage, For all defence, he read there to his Judges The Tragedy of Oedipus Coloneus,— The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Nora does need discipline badly; the discipline of England and my brother's well-ordered home will work wonders with her. Poor child, her father will miss her. I really sometimes think the Squire is getting into his dotage. He makes a perfect fool of that girl; to see her there speaking in that selfish way, and he petting her, and calling her ridiculous names, with no meaning in them, and folding her in his arms as if she were a baby, and all for pure, downright selfishness, is enough to make any sensible ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... as being much too wise to be ashamed of the pleasures of humanity, loved me indeed, but loved me with dignity; in a mean equally removed from the sourness, of forwardness, by which age is unpleasingly characterized, and from that childish silly dotage that so often disgraces it, and which he himself used to turn into ridicule, and compare to an old goat affecting the frisk ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... them, with all the bitterness of wit she was mistress of, with such malice, and ill-nature, that she was hated, not only by all the world, but by her own children and servants: The extremes of prodigality, and covetousness, of love, and hatred, of dotage, and fondness, met in her. A woman of this temper will be at no loss for the means of effecting any one's ruin, and having now conceived an aversion to our poetess, she was resolved to drive her from her house, with as much reproach as possible; and accordingly ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... of 1843 restored San Luis Rey to priestly control, but by that time its spoliation was nearly complete. Padre Zalvidea was in his dotage, and the four hundred Indians had scarcely anything left to them. Two years later the majordomo, appointed by Zalvidea to act for him, turned over the property to his successor, and the inventory shows the frightful wreckage. Of all the vast herds and flocks, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... this moment, Miss!" he cried furious; "you! here's a sort of thing for me to put up with. Sam Tozer wasn't born yesterday that a bit of an impudent girl should take upon her to do for him. Manage for me! go out o' my sight; I'm a fool, am I, and in my dotage to have a pack of women ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... art, served but to prove its deep degradation? Not one redeeming touch could be traced in the senseless caricatures, to whose authors' clumsy hands the mason's trowel would assuredly have been better adapted than the painter's pencil. It was the very dotage of incapacity. The colouring, the treatment, the coarse obtrusive mechanical touch, seemed those of a clumsily constructed automaton, rather than of a human painter. Thus musing, our artist stood for some time before the vile daubs that excited ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... his reign, when he seemed fallen into his dotage, the venerable predecessor of King Yoky had been much attached to an old gray-headed Chimpanzee, one day found meditating in the woods. Rozoko was his name. He was very grave, and reverend of aspect; much of a philosopher. To him, all gnarled and knotty subjects were familiar; in his day he had ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... cane of mine, they are realities to my inner conscience. Within every one of us there lives both a Don Quixote and a Sancho Panza to whom we hearken by turns; and though Sancho most persuades us, it is Don Quixote that we find ourselves obliged to admire.... But a truce to this dotage!—and let us go to see Madame de Gabry about some matters more important than the everyday details ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... whom the scholars loved most were Sister Euphrasie, Sister Sainte-Marguerite, Sister Sainte-Marthe, who was in her dotage, and Sister Sainte-Michel, whose long nose made ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... part in them. Indeed one very trying effect of the continued alarm about Charles was that he took to haunting the place, and report declared that he had talked loudly and coarsely of his cousin's death and his uncle's dotage, and of his soon being called in to manage the property for the little heir—insomuch that Sir Edmund Nutley thought it expedient to let him know that Charles, on going on active service soon after he had come of age, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... causes or circumstances, is the superiority of age. An old man, provided his age is not so far advanced as to give suspicion of dotage, is everywhere more respected than a young man of equal rank, fortune, and abilities. Among nations of hunters, such as the native tribes of North America, age is the sole foundation of rank and precedency. Among them, father is the appellation of a superior; ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith |
