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More "Dotage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there was just a decrepit old father and a lone daughter left to nurse him through his second childhood? All his other children are either married or dead; but both marriage and death have spared Miss Much-afraid to watch over the dotage-days of Mr. Despondency; till one summer afternoon the old man fell asleep in his chair to waken where old men are for ever young. And in a day or two there were two new graves side by side in the old churchyard. Even death could not ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... full many of them were in my chain Ytied; and now, what for unwieldy age And unlust, they may not to love attain: And sain that "Love is but very dotage!" Thus, for that they themself lacken courage, They folk exciten by their wicked saws For to rebell ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... did not believe in the Holy Scriptures, got hold of this, and said, 'Now look at that mighty mind of Newton, who discovered gravity, and told us such marvels for us all to admire, when he became an old man and got into his dotage, he began to study that book called the Bible; and it appears that in order to credit its fabulous nonsense, we must believe that mankind's knowledge will be so much increased that we shall be able to travel fifty miles an hour. The poor ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... with a Protestant minister who stands forth as the apologist of Catholicism; nor have I any confidence in one who does it, provided he is a man of intelligence, as I admit you to be. The only excuse I can render for your strange and inconsistent conduct is, that you are in your dotage; that you are a violent old partisan; and that you are the tool of designing demagogues, infamous disunionists, and unmitigated repudiators. I shall not be at all surprised to hear that you have apostatized from the Methodist Church, and gone over to the Roman ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... 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 world: I will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... deformities beauties in the eyes of fashion? and are not these people the favoured nurselings of the World, secure of her smiles, her caresses, her fostering praise, her partial protection, through all the dangers of youth and all the dotage ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... and working members of the state was thus done away— at the same time solving the social question by the most comprehensive and systematic emigration known in history. With all the determination and all the peevish obstinacy of dotage the restored oligarchy obtruded the principle of deceased generations—that Italy must remain the ruling land and Rome the ruling city in Italy—afresh on the present. Even in the lifetime of Gracchus the claims of the Italian allies had been ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... Crawley may be imagined, as these reports of his father's dotage reached the most exemplary and correct of gentlemen. He trembled daily lest he should hear that the Ribbons was proclaimed his second legal mother-in-law. After that first and last visit, his father's name was never mentioned in Pitt's ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brave, and follies of the wise! From Marlb'rough's eyes the streams of dotage flow, And Swift expires, a driv'ler and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... that two years ago she had heard his story. It was at the time that she bought the property, and the vendor had mentioned the Marquis as one of the curiosities of the soil. He was said to be half silly, at any rate an original, almost in his dotage, living by any lucky bits that he could make as horse-coper and veterinary. The peasants gave him a little work, as they feared that he might throw spells over anyone who refused to employ him. They ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... foolish but regnant brethren. I had heard tales of a growing sottishness, a decline in spirit, a squalid taste in pleasures. Small blame, I had always thought, to so ill-fated a princeling. And now I had chanced upon the gentleman in his dotage, travelling with a barren effort at mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics. It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... eyes, thou ruthless man! Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images Here represent their shadowy presences, 280 May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn, In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright Of conscience, for their long offended might, For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries, Unlawful magic, and enticing lies. Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch! Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... miracle of her rare birth, Leaving with wonder all our arts possess'd, That view the architecture of her nest. Pride raiseth us 'bove justice. We bestow Increase of knowledge on old minds, which grow By age to dotage; while the sensitive Part of the world in its first strength doth live. Folly! what dost thou in thy power contain Deserves our study? Merchants plough the main And bring home th' Indies, yet aspire to more, By avarice in the possession poor. And yet that idol wealth we all admit Into ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... At such times I laugh bitterly at myself, and see clearly my own natural misery. I come then to see the exceeding favour of the Lord in that He ever holds this insane fool fast in prayer and holiness. What would those who love and honour me think if they saw their friend in this dotage and distraction? I reflect at such times on the great hurt our original sin has done us. For it is from our first fall that all this has come to us that we so wander from God, and are so often utterly incapable of God. But it is not so much Adam's sin as my own that works in me all this ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... long ago, 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... counted death as 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
... public (with the probable reversion of immortality), showed no respect for himself, for that genius that had raised him to distinction, for that nature which he trampled under foot—who, amiable, frank, friendly, manly in private life, was seized with the dotage of age and the fury of a woman, the instant politics were concerned—who reserved all his candour and comprehensiveness of view for history, and vented his littleness, pique, resentment, bigotry, and intolerance on his contemporaries—who took the wrong side, and defended it by unfair means—who, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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
... was himself forspent, went forth the chamber tristful and woebegone, and bespoke Paganino with many words, that skilled not a jot. Ultimately, leaving the lady, he returned to Pisa, without having accomplished aught, and there for chagrin fell into such dotage that, as he went about Pisa, to whoso greeted him or asked him of anywhat, he answered nought but 'The ill hole[143] will have no holidays;'[144] and there, no great while after, he died. Paganino, hearing this and knowing the love the lady bore himself, espoused her to his lawful wife and thereafter, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Augustine could make his escape. At length the door opens, and my young master presents himself fully arrayed for his journey. The truth is, I think some fresh attack of his malady has affected the youth; he may perhaps be disturbed with some touch of hypochondria, or black choler, a species of dotage of the mind, which is sometimes found concomitant with and symptomatic of this disorder; but he is at present composed, and if your worship chooses to see him, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... doubt of the truth of spirit-rapping, table-turning, etc., and being pressed with the appeal, "Surely you must admit these are indications of Satanic agency," quietly answered, "It may be so, but it must be a mark of Satan being in a state of dotage!" ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Monarch should the Search descend, By Solon caution'd to regard his End, In Life's last Scene what Prodigies surprise, Fears of the Brave, and Follies of the Wise? From Marlb'rough's Eyes the Streams of Dotage flow, And Swift expires ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... 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 meddling ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... like thousands of "able editors," apologizes for such vulgar extravagance by urging that it "puts money in circulation, makes business better, and helps the people by supplying employment!" Has the world passed into its dotage, or simply become an universal asylum for idiots? If wanton waste makes business better, then Uncle Sam has but to squander in bal-masques, or other debauchery, his seventy-five billions of wealth to inaugurate an industrial ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was looking for one of those almost incredible excuses which are sometimes accepted by credulous old men when violent passions seize them in their dotage. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... 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. Vol. ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... period immediately following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, which busied itself in closing the canon of Jewish Scriptures Death bound up that Bible. No new chapters could be added, because there was no more life left to write them. In its dotage this noble nation became known, by its superstitious reverence for the law, as "the people of the book." Learned doctors gravely taught their pupils that "God himself studies the law for the first ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... talk big of the coming changes and his own distinguished 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, had sent home a will, making ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ancestors had received letters from Cromwell, he very earnestly assured me that he knew some cases in which persons' advancement in public life had been suddenly stopt by the Queen or her ministers, when it got wind that they were related in any way to Cromwell! I thought this a piece of dotage, as I do now; but I have heard elsewhere of some one not being allowed to take the name of Cromwell; I mean not very many years back; but more likely under a ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... he who governs the duchy. We are ruled at present by a triumvirate consisting of the Belverde, the Dominican and Trescorre. Pievepelago, the Prime Minister, is a dummy put in place by the Jesuits and kept there by the rivalries of the other three; but he is in his dotage and the courtiers are already laying wagers as to his successor. Many think Father Ignazio will replace him, but I stake my faith on Trescorre. The Duke dislikes him, but he is popular with the middle class, who, since they have shaken off the yoke of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... have nothing left them but their vanity. No 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 ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... old man 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 ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... with one exception, were singularly void of wit and the love of jesting. His sister was grave; his father gradually sinking into dotage; Coleridge was immersed in religious subtilties and poetic dreams; and Charles Lloyd, sad and logical and analytical, was the antithesis of all that is lively and humorous. But thoughts and images stole in from other quarters; and Lamb's mind was essentially quick and productive. Nothing lay barren ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... 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 hundreds of cigars. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have fallen into a state of dotage, and his three sons by Mahisi rose upon their aged parent, and put him in confinement. In this difficulty he applied to Adanuka, the wife of Chhatrapati, one of these unnatural sons, and promised, if she would procure his release, ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... George's boy had lived, he 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 ...
— The Cash Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... was planting at fourscore. Three striplings, who their satchels wore, 'In building,' cried, 'the sense were more; But then to plant young trees at that age! The man is surely in his dotage. Pray, in the name of common sense, What fruit can he expect to gather Of all this labour and expense? Why, he must live like Lamech's father! What use for thee, grey-headed man, To load the remnant of thy span With care for days that never can be ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... of the house, and during the following year there ensued a 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 a girl like ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... finger. "Aw, must I be y'r schoolmaster in the days of your dotage! Of course the ould fella has someone to watch, an' I dunno which it is—the Chinaman or the half-breed wumman. But I'll tell you this: they'll take his pay and lie to him about whatever's goin' on inside the house. That girl has them both in the palms of her hands. Let him set what spies ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 troops from exterminating ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... into his hands. This happened in 1806. And in this year 1846 the hairdresser is still paying that annuity. He has retired from business, he is seventy years old; the ci-devant young man is in his dotage; and as he has married his Mme. Evrard, he may last for a long while yet. As the hairdresser gave the woman thirty thousand francs, his bit of real estate has cost him, first and last, more than a million, and the house at this day is worth eight or nine ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... host, bareheaded at the gate till the rider's back was turned; then he came into the house, dropped into a chair at the open window and fixed his eyes, with a deep frown above them, upon the gray horse asleep in his dotage under the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... from Lord Stowell, who was a friend 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 ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... must have been in his dotage," Roy agreed. "In five minutes he told us all his life's history ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... 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 ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... of his life, he became somewhat inimical and unfriendly to dissenters[264], at least some of those who professed to own and adhere unto the same cause and testimony that he himself had contended and suffered somewhat for; whether this proceeded from the dotage of old age (as some would have it) or from mistaken principles, or any thing else, we cannot, and shall ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... she may be this Leddy Lightfinger.... No, that would be impossible. Leddy Lightfinger would have made an appointment. What possesses me to dwell in this realm of fancy, which is less tangible than a cloud of smoke? Have I reached my dotage by the way of the seven-league boots? Am I simply bored with the monotony of routine, and am I groping blindly for a new sensation?" He smoked thoughtfully. "Or, am I romantic? To create romance out of nothing; I used to do that when I was a boy. But I'm a boy ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... fingers into a 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
... says Edward 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 ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... extreme-unction day of Feudalism! A superannuated System of Society, decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced you, and what ye have and know!)—and with thefts and brawls, named glorious-victories; and with profligacies, sensualities, and on the whole with dotage and senility,—is now to die: and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born. What a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work! Battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of Moscow, Waterloos, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... opportunities and incident occasions all their hours should be disposed of; for, said Gargantua, the greatest loss of time that I know is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... relations you an' your mother's all I care for; because you'm of my awn blood an' you've let me bide, an' haven't been allus watchin' an' waitin' an' divin' me to the bottle. An' the man I was fule enough to take in his dotage be ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Livingstone says that but for the importunities of his friends, he meant to have kept this story in store to tell his children in his dotage. How little he made of it at the time will be seen from the following allusion to it in a letter to his father, dated 27th July, 1844. After telling how the attacks of the lions drew the people of Mabotsa away from the irrigating operations he was engaged in, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... most wretched and meagre- looking old man, with a threadbare hood of coarse kersey upon his head, and buttoned about his neck, while his pinched features, like those of old Daniel, were illuminated by —"an eye, Through the last look of dotage still cunning ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... wondrous fair, But, for all that, is the sooth contrair; For love is in young folk but rage, And in old folk a great dotage; Who most it useth, moste shall ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... 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, only 279 horses, 20 mules, 61 asses, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... at Kilmainham Hospital, then just completed, to the officers of the garrison of Dublin. After dinner he rose, filled a goblet to the brim with wine, and, holding it up, asked whether he had spilt one drop. "No, gentlemen; whatever the courtiers may say, I am not yet sunk into dotage. My hand does not fail me yet: and my hand is not steadier than my heart. To the health of King James!" Such was the last farewell of Ormond to Ireland. He left the administration in the hands of Lords Justices, and repaired to London, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... evident to our adventurers that the woman was in her dotage, while the old man was so frail that only a few of the sands of life remained to run. They both understood a little English, but spoke in such a remarkably broken manner, that there was little prospect of much additional information being ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... held a place in the circus field never attained by any other. He toured the world heralded as the champion, yet he would never permit himself to be announced as such. He earned two fortunes. Today at an age that leaves the greater number of men in their dotage, Mr. Robinson is healthy and active. He enjoys life as few old persons do. In the office of his friend, Dr. J. J. McClellan, he may be found almost any day, the center of a group of good fellows and none merrier than the once champion bare-back ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... am ruined, undone, I shall come to beggary,—five hundred and ninty-four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence," and the teeth of the old man began to chatter, terror and dotage and cunning, seeming to be striving within him for the mastery and altogether depriving him of ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... historian, when writing the history of these times, will ascribe the attempt of the President to enforce the Lecompton resolution upon an unwilling people to the fading intellect, the petulant passion and the trembling dotage of an old man on the ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... confirmed vitiosity make me daily do worse. I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then, because I was a child, and, because I commit them still, I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of AEson's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... those who have lived longer, of wrongs and falsehoods, of violence and circumvention; but such narratives are commonly regarded by the young, the heady, and the confident, as nothing more than the murmurs of peevishness, or the dreams of dotage; and, notwithstanding all the documents of hoary wisdom, we commonly plunge into the world fearless and credulous, without any foresight of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... fly. A suitable receptacle was constructed for this collection from the timber of the "Auld Gean Tree of Elchies"—the largest of its kind in all Scotland—whose trunk had a diameter of nearly four feet and whose branches had a spread of over twenty yards. The "Auld Gean Tree" fell into its dotage and was cut down to the strains of a "lament," with which the wail and skirl of the bagpipes drowned the noise of the woodmen's axes. Out of the wood of the "Auld Gean Tree" a local artificer constructed ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani in the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... on the disgraceful situation into which, by his merry contrivance, he had brought his Titania, and threw some of the juice of the other flower into her eyes; and the fairy queen immediately recovered her senses, and wondered at her late dotage, saying how she now loathed the sight ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... unable to keep the mass 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, and, through France, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... inevitable, all his time being needed there. Domestic matters, including the care of his two children, with which he had hitherto been burdened, pressed hard upon him, and he had been greatly depressed by finding his old father quite in his dotage, although he was not more than seventy-five. Watt was alone and very unhappy during a visit he made ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... the ancient Eastern world, or, at any rate, that portion of them which helped to make its history, either existed no longer or had sunk into their dotage. They had worn each other out in the centuries of their prime, Chaldaeans and Assyrians fighting against Cossaeans or Elamites, Egyptians against Ethiopians and against Hittites, Urartians, Armaeans, the peoples of Lebanon and of Damascus, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... more devout in the dark than in the light, at night than in the day-time, and with their eyes closed rather than open. We were received by the General of the order, Father Panizzoni, a little old man bent double with age, his eyes encircled with red, half blind, and I believe almost in his dotage. He was shedding tears of joy, and we all maintained the pious and serious aspect suited to the occasion, until the time arrived for the novice to step forward, when, lo! Father Panizzoni advanced with open arms toward the place where I stood, mistaking ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... was it that there had been a fire just like that, with the ashes like moss over the heat,—and on a night in winter, too, the wind rattling the panes? Where was it? While Soule stood waiting for his answer, his mind was drifting back, like that of a man in his dotage, through its dull, muddy thoughts, after that one silly memory. He struck on it at last. A year or two after he was married. In the bedroom. Martha was sitting by the fire, with the old yellow dog beside her: she was trying to ride the baby on his neck,—he was the clumsiest brute! He came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... idea seemed too madly far-fetched. At first she refused to realise that this apportioning of a continent three thousand miles distant from Germany was anything but a pipe-dream of diplomats in their dotage. It was inconceivable that it could be the practical and achievable cunning of military bullies and strategists. The truth dawned too slowly for her to display any vivid burst of anger. "It isn't true," she said. And then, "It seems incredible." And ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court and silent pathway and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them forever. It must be our task to glean ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... now I hate them." If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must have been tempted to applaud. The people of that land were his abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist. Towards the end he fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset; but those who played with him must be upon their guard, for if his side, which was always that of the English against the French, should chance to be defeated, there would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Count, very much astonished, "I am little more than seven hundred years old! My father lived a thousand, and was by no means in his dotage when ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dotage' none could beat Mr. Thomas Rawlinson, whose vast collections were dispersed in seventeen or eighteen auctions before the final sale in 1733. Mr. Heber in the present century is a modern example of the same kind. 'A book is a book,' he said: and he bought all that came in his way, by cart-loads ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... lock me up in 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 ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... missionary station, and thither I removed in 1843. Here an occurrence took place concerning which I have frequently been questioned in England, and which, but for the importunities of friends, I meant to have kept in store to tell my children when in my dotage. The Bakatla of the village Mabotsa were much troubled by lions, which leaped into the cattle pens by night and destroyed their cows. They even attacked the herds in open day. This was so unusual an occurrence that the people believed that they were bewitched,—"given," as they said, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... years, accordingly, the Editor of these Sheets was led to regard Teufelsdroeckh as a man not only who would never wed, but who would never even flirt; whom the grand-climacteric itself, and St. Martin's Summer of incipient Dotage, would crown with no new myrtle-garland. To the Professor, women are henceforth Pieces of Art; of Celestial Art, indeed; which celestial pieces he glories to survey in galleries, but has ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the matter wrote to the Lord Chancellor and the Earl of Salisbury declining the honour. He says: "My mynde in my younger times hath been ever free from ambition and now I am going to my grave, to gape for such a thing were mere dotage in me." Further, he prayed for "free liberty to dispose of myne owne as other of his Majesty's ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... 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 ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... deal of my time in his rooms reading Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, the last named being his ideal. He ridiculed the Lakers, whom I loved; and when Southey's last poem, "On Gooseberry Pie," appeared, he declared that the poor old man was in his dotage, to which I assented with sorrow in my heart. Though only one year older than I, yet, as a Junior, and from his superior knowledge of life, I regarded him as being about thirty. He was quite familiar, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... ask you, who is he? The husband of his wife, with a few paltry acres and the rank of a titular who has had the luck to marry an heiress! An upstart and a junker, like so many others! A type out of Shtchedrin! Upon my word, it's either that he's suffering from megalomania, or that old rat in his dotage, Count Alexey Petrovitch, is right when he says that children and young people are a long time growing up nowadays, and go on playing they are cabmen and generals till ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... else. It changes with the temper of every succeeding individual, and is subject to all the varieties of each. It is government through the medium of passions and accidents. It appears under all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage, a thing at nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. It reverses the wholesome order of nature. It occasionally puts children over men, and the conceits of nonage over wisdom and experience. In short, we cannot conceive ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... found it to be traditionally settled among the poor ladies that the poor gentlemen, whatever their ages, were all very old indeed, and in a state of dotage. I also discovered that the juniors and newcomers preserved, for a time, a waning disposition to believe in Titbull and his trustees, but that as they gained social standing they lost this faith, and disparaged Titbull and all ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... manufacturer, sixty-two years of age, who had looked scarce forty, the stout, comfortable, prosperous tradesman, with an almost bucolic air, and such a brisk demeanor that it did you good to look at him; the man with something boyish in his smile, had suddenly sunk into his dotage, and had become a ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... one General G.? He is a weazen-faced warrior, and in his dotage. I had him for a fellow-passenger on board a steamboat. I had also a statistical colonel with me, outside the coach from Cincinnati to Columbus. A New England poet buzzed about me on the Ohio, like a gigantic ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... practical man. He called things by their right names, and scorned to turn his head aside when life or himself was to be looked squarely in the eye. It is true that he cursed himself for a fool. He was neither in his youth nor in his dotage; he was in that long intermediate period where a man may hope that his will and sound common-sense are in their prime,—the interval of the minimum of mistakes. Nevertheless, he was as madly in love with Helena Belmont ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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
... the same stern order doth apply To the pranks of this remote age! We are sure alike to be thrust by, In our nonage, and our dotage. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... meantime Belle-Isle is besieged, and my two friends by now probably taken or killed. Poor Porthos! As to Master Aramis, he is always full of resources, and I am easy on his account. But, no, no; Porthos is not yet an invalid, nor is Aramis in his dotage. The one with his arm, the other with his imagination, will find work for his majesty's soldiers. Who knows if these brave men may not get up for the edification of his most Christian majesty a little bastion of Saint-Gervais! I don't despair of it. They have cannon and a ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "repose," and Mademoiselle—marvellous and incredible fact—Mademoiselle had married a grey-bearded, bald-headed personage whom her English visitor had mentally classed as a contemporary of "mon pere" and tottering on the verge of dotage. It appeared, however, by after accounts, that he was barely fifty, which Dick Victor insisted was an age of comparative vigour. "Quite a suitable match!" he had pronounced it, but Pixie obstinately withheld her approval. Mademoiselle, as mademoiselle, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... Vpon the trouble and the cruweltee [10] Which that they haue endured in theyre lyves By the felnesse of theyre fierce wyves, Which is a tourment verray importable, A bonde of sorowe, a knott vnremuwable. For whoo is bounde or locked in maryage, Yif he beo olde, he falleth in dotage, And yong folkes, of theyre lymes sklendre, Grene and lusty, and of brawne but tendre, Phylosophres callen in suche aage A Chylde to wyve, a woodnesse ...
— The Disguising at Hertford • John Lydgate
... would be sure enough to do! Shall I have it said that Mukhum Dass keeps a dozen women in his dotage?" ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... I would shee had bestowed this dotage on mee, I would haue daft all other respects, and made her halfe my selfe: I pray you tell Benedicke of it, and ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... I want to speak to you about Miss Emily. May I take your arm? Thank you. At my age, girls in general—unless they are my patients—are not objects of interest to me. But that girl at the cottage—I daresay I am in my dotage—I tell you, sir, she has bewitched me! Upon my soul, I could hardly be more anxious about her, if I was her father. And, mind, I am not an affectionate man by nature. Are ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... condition, a fierce interest, in the principle and progress of the strife? And how should they have failed to know that, during this controversy, innumerable persons raised from the lower rank by talent and spirit, had left no place on earth except in courts (and hardly even there) for the dotage of fancying some innate difference between the classes distinguished in the artificial order ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Take care: I am in my dotage. Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... and I am to pay for your funeral and buy you a hooded cloak... that's what he thinks. I don't think! You won't live to see me do it! If your Julina is so sweet, you'd better make haste and go to her. Was it I who was supposed to look after you in your dotage? She is the pet, and ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... started slightly. He recalled certain acid comments of the bishop, followed by a statement that a young cure should be sent, gently to supersede the old priest, who was in his dotage. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Christmas changes not! Long, long ago He won the treasure of eternal youth; Yours is the dotage—if you want to know ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... 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, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... men, speaking under such absolute conviction of the truth, to be lightly valued or underrated? Are their opinions, because consistent, to be treated with contempt, and consistency itself to be sneered at as the prerogative of obstinacy and dotage? Was there no truth, then, in the opinions which, on this point of protection, the Premier has maintained for so many years; or, if not, is their fallacy so very glaring, that he can expect all ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... eccentric yellow cloak? Nay, I think it may have been in part this very note of undisguised vanity in the man that made it difficult to keep one's eyes off him: it tickled the sense of humour, and challenged the curiosity. What would his state of mind be, who, in the dotage of the Nineteenth Century, went laboriously out of his way to cultivate a fragmentary ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... my mind nothing but vague memories, as of a dream), had I not been assured that the chevalier got out of the carriage without any help, walked about, and acted with as much presence of mind as a young man. On the following day he fell into a state of absolute dotage and insensibility, and never rose from his ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and he had the reputation of being the oldest Sunday School teacher in the Five Towns. He was indeed exceedingly old, foolish, and undignified in senility; and the louts were odiously jeering at his defenceless dotage, and a young policeman was obviously with the louts and against the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... relations had just been shot): "He will write a few pathetic pages and read them aloud in the faubourg Saint-Germain; pretty women will shed tears, and that will console him."—(On Abbe Delille): "He is wit in its dotage."—(On Pasquier and Mole): "I make the most of one, and made the other."—Madame de Remusat, II., 389, 391, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... bit; why should it? But he really is not ill, only getting feeble and obstinate. The man is in his dotage. I saw him yesterday, and he refused, most perversely, to sanction the marriage until some facts shall come to his knowledge, of which he is not quite certain at present. I told him the young people would not wait; and he replied, that if I give you my daughter now, I shall do so at my peril; ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... moment of their triumph the assailants of the Church found a leader in John of Gaunt. The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the Crown. Edward himself was sinking into dotage. Of his sons the Black Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish campaign, was fast drawing to the grave; he had lost a second son by death in childhood; the third, Lionel of Clarence, had died ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... 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 ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... foreman and his tailor to join 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; ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... happen. I'm not to be intimidated by any of your airs." And seeing that the old man's rage was such that he simply could not speak, he took the opportunity of going on: "I don't care two straws which you do—I'm out to show you who's master. If you think in your dotage you can domineer any longer—well, you'll find two can play at that game. Come, now, which are ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and saw a 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. Then she wriggled, stretched forth her ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... your dotage, sir, And yet a boy in vanity! But know Yourself from me; you are old and ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... mean by treating him like this? Did he think he would endure to be set aside thus deliberately as one whose words had no weight? Did he think—confound him!—did he think that he had reached his dotage? ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... thing like an inconsistency, we may impute it, as we think proper, either to the author or to his transcribers. * Note: The Millenium is described in what once stood as the XLIst Article of the English Church (see Collier, Eccles. Hist., for Articles of Edw. VI.) as "a fable of Jewish dotage." The whole of these gross and earthly images may be traced in the works which treat on the Jewish traditions, in Lightfoot, Schoetgen, and Eisenmenger; "Das enthdeckte Judenthum" t. ii 809; and briefly in Bertholdt, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... be 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
... 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
... miles, we came upon a very old native at a fire in the thicket. Jemmy could not understand what he said, but he thought that he meant that there were a number of armed natives about. He was very frightened, howled the whole time we stayed, and was apparently in his dotage, hardly able to walk. Continuing our journey, we camped at a small water-hole in some granite rocks, with good feed around them, about sixteen miles East-North-East ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... his office in Bermuda next called him there, after which he resided in Paris, where he wrote his famous "Fables for the Holy Alliance." Returning to England, he settled at Bow-wood near Wiltshire, the seat of his life-long friend, Lord Lansdowne. There he spent his declining years and died in dotage. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... head in mock melancholy over his supposed intellectual dotage. Unorna turned away, this time with the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... ages gave to the new inclination of the queen a stamp of dotage inconsistent with the reputation for good sense and dignity of conduct which she had hitherto preserved. Nor did she long receive from the indulgence of so untimely a sentiment any portion of the felicity ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... wake, all this derision Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision.' . . . 'Her dotage now I do begin to pity.' . . . 'And think no more of this night's accidents But as the fierce vexation of a dream.' ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... hert 1420 & breyed vppe i{n} to his brayn & blemyst his my{n}de, & al waykned his wyt, & wel ne[gh]e he foles, For he wayte[gh] onwyde, his wenches he byholdes, & his bolde baronage, aboute bi e wo[gh]es; 1424 [Sidenote: A cursed thought takes possession of him.] e{n}ne a dotage ful depe drof to his hert, & a caytif cou{n}sayl he ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... engages Both sexes, all ages, The poor as well as the wealthy; From the court to the cottage, From childhood to dotage, Both those that are sick ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... Death drew the tap of life, and let it gon: And ever since hath so the tap y-run, Till that almost all empty is the tun. The stream of life now droppeth on the chimb. The silly tongue well may ring and chime Of wretchedness, that passed is full yore*: *long With olde folk, save dotage, is ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... circulated at the expense of the Bank thirty thousand copies of this remarkable document. Biddle declared that Jackson was like "a chained panther, biting the bars of his cage." Webster and John Quincy Adams, taking counsel of their hopes, declared that the old man in the White House was in his dotage and at ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... and protest," said Mr. Mumbray, in a confidential ear, "that if it weren't for the look of the thing, I would withhold my vote altogether! W.-B. is in his dotage. And to think that we might have put new life into the ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... "Has he now? He is getting into his dotage. Well, what does it matter? We have a good law of divorce in these parts, friend. I am going in for that girl; if I give a hundred ounces for her I will buy her, and I have ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... minister, but the jealous monarch that we have to guard against. Hear me, Bona, one of two fates must now be mine. Death—or thy hand, and with it the crown of Poland. Do not start. There is for me no middle station. You may be safe. A few tears, a few smiles, and the old king will lapse into his dotage." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... 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
... that, since the mental competence of this man is concerned—since it is our contention that he is patently and plainly a victim of senility, an individual prematurely in his dotage—any utterances by him will be of no value whatsoever in aiding the conscience and intelligence of the court to arrive at a fair and just conclusion regarding the defendant's ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... my first conscious sentiment was one of pity. Clearly, Professor Farrago was on the verge of dotage—ah, what ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... Often they have tramped Paris till daybreak, meditating the great chance for Paulette. And at last the poet has discovered it: for each verse a different phase of life, but through it all, the pursuit of gaiety, the fever of the dance—the gaiety of youth, the gaiety of dotage, the gaiety of despair! It should be the song of the pleasure-seekers—the voices of Paris when ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... of ditto) houses, or rather 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 extended oppressive rule over the coasts of North-West ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... 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 a touch ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of so long a time at this uncle's?—Why, this old sinner, who imagines himself entitled to call me to account for my freedoms with the sex, has lately fallen into familiarities, as it is suspected, with his housekeeper; who assumes airs upon it.—A cursed deluding sex!—In youth, middle age, or dotage, they ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... in the meantime, Belle-Isle is besieged, and my two friends are taken or killed. Poor Porthos! As to Master Aramis, he is always full of resources, and I am quite easy on his account. But, no, no; Porthos is not yet an invalid, and Aramis is not yet in his dotage. The one with his arm, the other with his imagination, will find work for his majesty's soldiers. Who knows if these brave men may not get up for the edification of his Most Christian Majesty a little bastion of Saint-Gervais! ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... am not in my dotage," she cries, gayly. "Neither am I such a wonderful believer in love. There are many other qualities requisite for what I call a ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... quite in my dotage yet," quoth Tanty, drily; "neither am I in the habit of making unfounded assertions, nephew. I have heard what the girl has said with her own lips, I have read what she has written in her diary; she has sobbed and cried over your cruelty in these very ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... all-benign old age With dotage mocked; not gallantry that faints And still pursues; not the vile heritage ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... quite a good-sized, respectable nose upon your face. I submit that the situation is quite as plain as that nose, if you look at it in the broad light of understanding. If you think that I am marrying Anne because I love her, or because I am in my dotage and afflicted with senility, you are very much mistaken. If you think I am giving her two million dollars as a wedding gift because I expect it to purchase her love and esteem, you do my intelligence an injustice. If you think that I ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... Davus! nay, if he's inclin'd To punish me, he'll seize on some pretense To throw me into prison, right or wrong. Another mischief is, this Andrian, Mistress or wife, 's with child by Pamphilus. And do but mark their confidence! 'tis sure The dotage of mad people, not of lovers. Whate'er she shall bring forth, they have resolv'd To educate: and have among themselves Devis'd the strangest story! that Glycerium Is an Athenian citizen. "There was Once on a time a certain merchant, ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... 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 ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... this dotage from thy spright? Thy heart is dazed and rest to thee forbidden quite. Is't not enough for thee to have a weeping eye And vitals still on fire for memory and despite? For self-conceit, indeed, he laugheth, when he saith, "The day obliterates ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... to receive a note, from a minor, (if you have not made an associate of him); one that has been posted; one that has been publicly disgraced without resenting it; one whose occupation is unlawful; a man in his dotage and a lunatic. There may be other cases, but the character of those enumerated will lead to a correct decision ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson
... be a man in the full possession of his intellects, not so young that his mind shall not have been formed, nor so old that it shall have fallen into dotage; neither a fool, an idiot, nor a madman; and with so much education as to enable him to avail himself of the teachings of Masonry, and to cultivate at his leisure a knowledge of the principles and doctrines of our ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... 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 ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... hands or of receyt; of few; of quick returne tedious; of praesent iudgment; of vncerten yssue. Seuerall playes or Ideas of play. Frank play; wary play, venturous not venturous quick slowe; Oversight Dotage Betts Lookers on Judgment groome porter; Christmas; Invention for hunger Oddes; stake; sett; He that folowes his losses & giueth soone over at wynnings will never gayne by play Ludimus ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... time we got back to Belvane; we have left her alone too long. It was more than Udo did. Just now he was with her in her garden, telling her for the fifth time an extraordinarily dull story about an encounter of his with a dragon, apparently in its dotage, to which Belvane was listening with an interest which surprised ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... Times solely because the proprietor late in life suddenly 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
... 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 of each ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Joseph is not only old, but appears almost in a state of dotage, like a lean, wrinkled mendicant, with a bald head, a white beard, a feeble frame, and a sleepy or stupid countenance. Then, again, the later Italian painters have erred as much on the other side; for I have seen pictures in which St. Joseph is not only a young ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... a few of the more trenchant absurdities. Many argue that the whole idea of sovereignty is modern and imported; but it seems impossible that anything so foolish should have been suddenly devised, and the constitution bears on its front the marks of dotage. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gone to his last "repose," and Mademoiselle—marvellous and incredible fact—Mademoiselle had married a grey-bearded, bald-headed personage whom her English visitor had mentally classed as a contemporary of "mon pere" and tottering on the verge of dotage. It appeared, however, by after accounts, that he was barely fifty, which Dick Victor insisted was an age of comparative vigour. "Quite a suitable match!" he had pronounced it, but Pixie obstinately withheld her approval. Mademoiselle, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... grandson? If George's boy had lived, he 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 Cash Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... 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 ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... virtues as Dr. Heidegger imputed to it, could not have been bestowed on four human beings who needed it more woefully. They looked as if they had never known what youth or pleasure was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and always the gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures who now sat stooping round the doctor's table without life enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of growing ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indirectness to accomplish in an hour what strenuous aiming will not effect in a life-time, she fascinated the Bishop to an unprecedented degree. A bachelor, he rejoiced in the commanding period of life that stretches between the time of waning impulse and the time of incipient dotage, when a woman can reach the male heart neither by awakening a young man's passion nor an old man's infatuation. He must be made to admire, or he can be made to do nothing. Unintentionally that is how Viviette operated on ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... aloud, "Has he now? He is getting into his dotage. Well, what does it matter? We have a good law of divorce in these parts, friend. I am going in for that girl; if I give a hundred ounces for her I will buy her, and I have brought the gold ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... and see clearly my own natural misery. I come then to see the exceeding favour of the Lord in that He ever holds this insane fool fast in prayer and holiness. What would those who love and honour me think if they saw their friend in this dotage and distraction? I reflect at such times on the great hurt our original sin has done us. For it is from our first fall that all this has come to us that we so wander from God, and are so often utterly incapable of God. But it is not so much Adam's ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... sister of his speech. He had loved her greatly, he said. I knew next to nothing about her, and his fine smile and courtly, aged, deferential manners made me very nervous. I felt as if I had been taken to pay a ceremonial visit to a supreme pontiff in his dotage. He spoke about Horton Priory with some animation for a little while, and then faltered, and forgot what he was speaking of. Suddenly ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... their periods of youthful vigor, their manhood of sturdy strength, the tottering of decrepit age, the imbecility of superstitious dotage—and their death is final extinction. Such is man, and such is the world. What we are, we know; what we shall be, we know not, save that we only leave a pile of bones. Come, we are approaching home, and the moon dares to shine, ere yet the sun has gone. Yonder ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... 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 world: I will offer ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Lightfinger.... No, that would be impossible. Leddy Lightfinger would have made an appointment. What possesses me to dwell in this realm of fancy, which is less tangible than a cloud of smoke? Have I reached my dotage by the way of the seven-league boots? Am I simply bored with the monotony of routine, and am I groping blindly for a new sensation?" He smoked thoughtfully. "Or, am I romantic? To create romance out of nothing; I ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... him, Before the Areopagus, of dotage, For all defence, he read there to his Judges The Tragedy of Oedipus Coloneus,— The work ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... daily do worse. I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then, because I was a child, and, because I commit them still, I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of AEson's bath ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... accordingly, the Editor of these Sheets was led to regard Teufelsdroeckh as a man not only who would never wed, but who would never even flirt; whom the grand-climacteric itself, and St. Martin's Summer of incipient Dotage, would crown with no new myrtle-garland. To the Professor, women are henceforth Pieces of Art; of Celestial Art, indeed; which celestial pieces he glories to survey in galleries, but has lost thought ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... finally, although the town, in order to manifest its affection for him, elected his son-in-law, Monsieur Beauvisage, mayor in his stead, it now revolted against him and some young striplings went so far as to talk of his dotage. The partisans of Simon Giguet then turned to Phileas Beauvisage, the mayor, and won him over the more easily to their side because, without having quarrelled with his father-in-law, he assumed an independence of him which had ended in coldness,—an independence that the sly old notary ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... or dotage' none could beat Mr. Thomas Rawlinson, whose vast collections were dispersed in seventeen or eighteen auctions before the final sale in 1733. Mr. Heber in the present century is a modern example of the same kind. 'A book is a book,' he said: and he bought ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... perfect thy understanding, O our father,) it is not a cock but a cow that is missing." "Go look for the cock," persevered the old man; they obeyed, but this time again without success. People wondered and thought him in a state of mere dotage. Next came the news that a man was killed. The father pertinaciously adhered to his first injunctions, and ordered his sons to look for the cock. Again they returned without finding it, and in the end it came to pass that the killing of the man brought ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... by men of our own time, that are not lightly to be rejected; but to give too easy credit to such things, or wholly to disbelieve them, is equally dangerous, so incapable is human infirmity of keeping any bounds, or exercising command over itself, running off sometimes to superstition and dotage, at other times to the contempt and neglect of all that is supernatural. But moderation is best, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... said Mr. Mumbray, in a confidential ear, "that if it weren't for the look of the thing, I would withhold my vote altogether! W.-B. is in his dotage. And to think that we might have put new ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... 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
... its fortunes during the five or six years I continued a gleaner. I was surprised to see one of these old ladies toddling about the village only a few weeks ago, though her gathering-days are long since past. She is the last survivor of the quorum, and is now fast fading into dotage. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... Alan's journey and Darsie's own wanderings; the scenes at the Provost's dinner-table and in Tam Turnpenny's den; that unique figure, the skipper of the Jumping Jenny; the extraordinarily effective presentment of Prince Charles, already in his decadence, if not yet in his dotage; the profusion of smaller sketches and vignettes everywhere grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper Steenie,—who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again in a single book. There is something in it which it is ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... thought to refer to mere progress of time carries the thought of a result desired; as, to attain to old age; the man desires to live to a good old age; we should not speak of his attaining his dotage. One may attain an object that will prove not worth his labor, but what he achieves is in itself great and splendid; as, the Greeks at Marathon achieved a glorious victory. Compare DO; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... which 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... but regnant brethren. I had heard tales of a growing sottishness, a decline in spirit, a squalid taste in pleasures. Small blame, I had always thought, to so ill-fated a princeling. And now I had chanced upon the gentleman in his dotage, travelling with a barren effort at mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics. It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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. ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... Nay, but this dotage of our general's O'erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes, That o'er the files and musters of the war Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front; his captain's heart, Which in the scuffles of great ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... "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 skitch o' yer ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... like these await, Who set unclouded in the Gulphs of Fate. From Lydia's Monarch should the Search descend, By Solon caution'd to regard his End, In Life's last Scene what Prodigies surprise, Fears of the Brave, and Follies of the Wise? From Marlb'rough's Eyes the Streams of Dotage flow, And Swift expires ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... either in its dotage, or still worse. Burnside's unsoldierly blundering is compared to the great victorious splendors of Asperm, Esslingen, Wagram, and the tyrant-crushing three days of immortal Waterloo! The Tribune lauds the crossing ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... don't be vexed with me!" Too late the old woman regretted her foolish words. "I'm growing old, and maybe I'm in my dotage ... ah, he's gone—I've driven the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... deceived her 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 ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... hesitated in their movements, or spared their opponent. The key to this conduct was their dubious position with the Russian court. The Empress, Elizabeth, continually instigated by her minister, Bestuzheff, against Prussia, was in her dotage, was subject to daily fits of drunkenness, and gave signs of approaching dissolution. Her nephew, Peter, the son of her sister, Anna, and of Charles Frederick, Prince of Holstein-Gottorp, the heir to the throne of Russia, was a profound admirer of the great Prussian monarch, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Alexander's son, on his feet, financially and politically. I think he must have wanted the owlet back again before he was done with Anne, because Anne was a termagant—and ruled him with the heaviest rod of iron she could lift. But this last passion—the flickering, sputtering flame of his dotage—was the worst of all, both subjectively and objectively; both as to his senile fondness for the English princess and her impish tormenting of him. From the first he evinced the most violent delight in Mary, who repaid it by holding him off and evading him in a manner so cool, audacious and adroit ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... on, thought Cecil. But if Miss Arminster tried to take advantage of his dotage to forge another link in her matrimonial chain, he, Banborough, would have a word to say on ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lost 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 too ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... remained true to its nature; they despised faithful exhortations in their presumption and carnal security, and the holy patriarchs they treated as men in dotage and as simpletons because of their threat that God would move in wrath even upon his Church, namely, the heirs of the promise of ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... 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 ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... senior, would naturally expect to command and whom he considered "too far advanced in life and too inactive" for such an enterprise. At this time McDowell must have been nearly thirty-nine; and Shelby, who was just thirty, wisely refused to risk the campaign under a general who was in his dotage! ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... Long, long ago He won the treasure of eternal youth; Yours is the dotage—if you want to ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... coming changes and his own distinguished 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, had sent home a will, making his son, who was a young ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... much nearer to my own. As to the rest, in this traffic, I did not suffer myself to be totally carried away; I pleased myself in it, but did not forget myself. I retained the little sense and discretion that nature has given me, entire for their service and my own: a little emotion, but no dotage. My conscience, also, was engaged in it, even to debauch and licentiousness; but, as to ingratitude, treachery, malice, and cruelty, never. I would not purchase the pleasure of this vice at any price, but content myself with its proper ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... for the sound carries me far back into the past, when my own children romped and shouted at Le Bocage. You were always a quiet, demure, and rather solemn child; but this Huldah is a gay little sprite. St. Elmo is so astonishingly patient with her, that Estelle accuses him of being in his dotage. Oh, Edna! it would make you glad to see my son and that orphan child sitting together reading the Bible. Last week I found them in the library; she was fast asleep with her head on his knee, and he sat with his open Bible in his hand. He is so changed in his manner that ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... lady put her hand in that of her lover, and answered quietly, "Nay, but I had no mind to wed with one who was already in his dotage; little good the lands, and castles, and gold would have done me, had I been obliged to spend my time in nursing an old man; and, as for my father, I know he will secretly rejoice when he hears, that, after all, I shall wed ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... system, not equitable in itself, is infinitely unjust, if a story, often told by my poor old grandfather, was true, which I own I am inclined to doubt. The old man, sir, had learned in his youth, or dreamed in his dotage, that Scotland had become an integral part of England,—not in right of conquest, or rendition, or through any right of inheritance—but in virtue of a solemn Treaty of Union. Nay, so distinct an idea had he of this supposed Treaty, that he used to recite one of its articles to this ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... was the first to meet Kutuzov at the castle where the latter was to stay. In undress naval uniform, with a dirk, and holding his cap under his arm, he handed Kutuzov a garrison report and the keys of the town. The contemptuously respectful attitude of the younger men to the old man in his dotage was expressed in the highest degree by the behavior of Chichagov, who knew of the accusations that were ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... against 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 engagement ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... see how 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
... persuasion; and to all the grave affairs of life he applied ability and pains beyond belief.'[1] His first care was to reduce Rome to order. The old factions of Colonna and Orsini, which Sixtus had scotched, but which had raised their heads again during the dotage of Innocent, were destroyed in his Pontificate. In this way, as Machiavelli observed,[2] he laid the real basis for the temporal power of the Papacy. Alexander, indeed, as a sovereign, achieved for the Papal See what Louis XI. had done ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... be in their right minds, because testaments extorted through the phrenzy of a disease, or dotage of old age, were not in reality the wills of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... Robin! See'st thou this sweet sight? Her dotage now I do begin to pity: For meeting her of late behind the wood, I then did ask of her her changeling child, Which strait she gave me; wherefore I'll undo This hateful imperfection of her eyes: [He strokes her eyes with the flower. Now, Fairy, ...
— A Fairy Tale in Two Acts Taken from Shakespeare (1763) • William Shakespeare
... absorb all the ordinary purposes and feelings of mortality. One only human affection gleamed through her enthusiastic energies, like the broken glimpses of the sun through the rising clouds of a storm. It was her maternal fondness for her grandson—a fondness carried almost to the verge of dotage, in circumstances where the Catholic religion was not concerned, but which gave way instantly when it chanced either to thwart or come in contact with the more settled purpose of her soul, and the more devoted duty of her life. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Robinson, he held a place in the circus field never attained by any other. He toured the world heralded as the champion, yet he would never permit himself to be announced as such. He earned two fortunes. Today at an age that leaves the greater number of men in their dotage, Mr. Robinson is healthy and active. He enjoys life as few old persons do. In the office of his friend, Dr. J. J. McClellan, he may be found almost any day, the center of a group of good fellows and none ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... of their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court and silent pathway and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them forever. It must be our task to glean and gather them forth, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... till after the Reformation that there was any systematic hunting out of witches in England. Then, no doubt, the innocent charms and rhyming prayers of the old religion were regarded as incantations, and twisted into evidence against miserable beldames who mumbled over in their dotage what they had learned at their mother's knee. It is plain, at least, that this was one of ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... await, Who set unclouded in the gulphs of Fate. From Lydia's monarch[4] should the search descend, By Solon caution'd to regard his end, In life's last scene what prodigies surprise, Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise! From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow, And Swift expires a driveller ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... know one General G.? He is a weazen-faced warrior, and in his dotage. I had him for a fellow-passenger on board a steamboat. I had also a statistical colonel with me, outside the coach from Cincinnati to Columbus. A New England poet buzzed about me on the Ohio, like a gigantic bee. A mesmeric doctor, of an impossibly great age, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... put away this dotage from thy spright? Thy heart is dazed and rest to thee forbidden quite. Is't not enough for thee to have a weeping eye And vitals still on fire for memory and despite? For self-conceit, indeed, he laugheth, when he saith, "The day obliterates ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... ridiculous or odious by the artifice of lying? But it is the disease of the age; and no wonder if the world, growing old, begin to be infirm: old age itself is a disease. It is long since the sick world began to dote and talk idly: would she had but doted still! but her dotage is now broke forth into a madness, and ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... admiration of the public (with the probable reversion of immortality), shewed no respect for himself, for that genius that had raised him to distinction, for that nature which he trampled under foot—who, amiable, frank, friendly, manly in private life, was seized with the dotage of age and the fury of a woman, the instant politics were concerned—who reserved all his candour and comprehensiveness of view for history, and vented his littleness, pique, resentment, bigotry, and intolerance on his contemporaries—who took the wrong side, and defended it by unfair means—who, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... rather, the relics of a family, where there was just a decrepit old father and a lone daughter left to nurse him through his second childhood? All his other children are either married or dead; but both marriage and death have spared Miss Much-afraid to watch over the dotage-days of Mr. Despondency; till one summer afternoon the old man fell asleep in his chair to waken where old men are for ever young. And in a day or two there were two new graves side by side in the old churchyard. Even death could not divide this old father and his ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... 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 ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... fury in their faces, will run you up to a fabulous price at the auction, and you will at last be put into free quarters for life in some shady alcove upon some lofty shelf, with unlimited rations of dust, as you glide into a vermiculate dotage. Why should you be faint-hearted, when the men of the stalls ask such a breath-stretching price for the productions of William Whitehead, Esq., who used to celebrate the birthdays of old George the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... branches, changing its name like a coward, throws itself into the Meuse near Rotterdam; the other still called the Rhine, but with the ridiculous surname of "curved," reaches Utrecht with difficulty, where for the fourth time it again divides; capricious as an old man in his dotage. One part, denying its old name, drags itself as far as Muiden, where it falls into the Zuyder-Zee; the other, with the name of Old Rhine, or simply the Old, flows slowly to the city of Leyden, whose streets it ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... too fast, not knowing me, Nor the engines that I work by. 'Tis not alone The lady Allworth's lands; for those, once Wellborn's (As by her dotage on him I know they will be,) Shall soon be mine. But point out any man's In all the shire, and say they lie convenient, And useful for your lordship, and once more I say ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... mass 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, and, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at the same time arrested, but allowed to retire beyond seas; Lord Mountgarrett, an octogenarian, and in his dotage, was seized, but nothing could be made out against him; a Colonel Peppard was also denounced from England, but no such person was found to exist. So far the first year of the plot had passed over, and proved nothing against the Catholic Irish. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... forget old purposes and enmities, and join interest with the Kingship: on this younger strength it would fain stay its decrepitude; and these two will henceforth stand and fall together. Alas, the Sorbonne still sits there, in its old mansion; but mumbles only jargon of dotage, and no longer leads the consciences of men: not the Sorbonne; it is Encyclopedies, Philosophie, and who knows what nameless innumerable multitude of ready Writers, profane Singers, Romancers, Players, Disputators, and Pamphleteers, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... be in my dotage,—as I should be if I permitted my son to marry a beggarly Italian,—nor too old to punish impertinence as it deserves," retorted ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... sexes, all ages— The poor as well as the wealthy; From the Court to the cottage, From childhood to dotage, Both those that are ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... have not yet quite died out, can only be fully explained by Mrs. Montagu's great wealth and position in society. Contemptible as was her essay, yet a saying of hers about Voltaire was clever. 'He sent to the Academy an invective [against Shakespeare] that bears all the marks of passionate dotage. Mrs. Montagu happened to be present when it was read. Suard, one of their writers, said to her, "Je crois, Madame, que vous etes un peu fache (sic) de ce que vous venez d'entendre." She replied, "Moi, Monsieur! point du tout! Je ne suis pas amie de M. Voltaire."' Walpole's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... his foreman and his tailor to join 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 no worse taste than is a mixture of bastard ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... fifty miles an hour. Voltaire, who did not believe in the Holy Scriptures, got hold of this, and said, 'Now look at that mighty mind of Newton, who discovered gravity, and told us such marvels for us all to admire, when he became an old man and got into his dotage, he began to study that book called the Bible; and it appears that in order to credit its fabulous nonsense, we must believe that mankind's knowledge will be so much increased that we shall be able to travel fifty miles an hour. The poor 'dotard!' exclaimed ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... 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 ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... of Sir Gawaine, Sir Tor, and King Pellinore, it fell so that Merlin fell in a dotage on the damosel that King Pellinore brought to court, and she was one of the damosels of the lake, that hight Nimue. But Merlin would let her have no rest, but always he would be with her. And ever she made Merlin good cheer till she had learned of him all ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... the species, but in the individuals that compose it; whereas a beast is, at the end of some months, all he ever will be during the rest of his life; and his species, at the end of a thousand years, precisely what it was the first year of that long period. Why is man alone subject to dotage? Is it not, because he thus returns to his primitive condition? And because, while the beast, which has acquired nothing and has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in possession of his instinct, man, losing by old age, or by accident, all the acquisitions he had made ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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, or by design, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... 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 ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... outdoor relief, whose evils I am tired of recapitulating,—our shameless abuse of the hospital system,—the crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring for them,—what is it ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... for from you; mind that. But pray, is not this estate our estate, as we may say? Have we not all an interest in it, and a prior right, if right were to have taken place? And was it not more than a good old man's dotage, God rest his soul! that gave it you before us all?—Well then, ought we not to have a choice who shall have it in marriage with you? and would you have the conscience to wish us to let a vile ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... 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 ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... doctrinal, liturgical, disciplinary, moral, and what may be called ecclesiastical. He includes in the sweep of his very impartial denunciation not only the pernicious tenets of Pelagianism, Arminianism, Latitudinarianism, and Popish errors, but "the dotage of Quakers and other enthusiasts," human inventions in worship, and the private essays made to introduce or impose an unwarrantable liturgie of unsound and useless form, the loose spirit of atheism, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... naval and military uniforms that I, in my somber civilian clothing, felt wan and lonely. Most of the evening I passed in modest retirement, looking out upon the brilliant scene from behind a potted palm. And yet, when my companion and I, now in our dotage, recently visited the Chamberlin, there stood the same potted palm in the same place. Or if it was not the same, it was one ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... didn't know better,' said Lavvy. 'And if my grandmamma wasn't in her dotage when she took to insisting on people's retiring to dark apartments, she ought to have been. A pretty exhibition my grandmamma must have made of herself! I wonder whether she ever insisted on people's retiring into the ball of St Paul's; and if she did, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... not spoken by me." King Charles was poisoned; the Duke of York 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 hands of ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... than this same earl, who was ever foremost in pursuit of such pleasures as wine begets and love appeases. His mirth was the most buoyant, his conversation the most agreeable, his manner the most engaging in the world; whence he became "the delight and wonder of men, the love and dotage of women." A courtier possessed of so happy a disposition, and endowed with such brilliant talents, could not fail in pleasing the king; who vastly enjoyed his society, but was occasionally obliged to banish his person from court, when his eccentric conduct ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... "This is folly—dotage;" said Ellinor, indignantly: "Surely there are others, as brave, as gentle, as kind, and if not so wise, yet more ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... without asking references. Poor woman, what thrills of horror ran through her when she saw our furniture set down before her door! You had six plates, three of which were of porcelain, a Shakspeare, the works of Victor Hugo, a chest of drawers in its dotage, and a Phrygian cap. By some extraordinary chance, I had two mattresses, a hundred and fifty volumes, an arm-chair, two plain chairs, a table, and a skull. The idea of making a grand sofa belongs to you, I confess; but it was a deplorable idea. We sawed off the four feet of a cot-bedstead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... the child was able to say a few words, he entertained himself for hours at a time talking with the tot under the shade of the eucalyptus tree. A certain mental failing was beginning to be noticed in the old man. Although not exactly in his dotage, his aggressiveness was becoming very childish. Even in his most affectionate moments, he used to contradict everybody, and hunt up ways ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... thirty thousand francs so long as the bachelor lived, it passed into his hands. This happened in 1806. And in this year 1846 the hairdresser is still paying that annuity. He has retired from business, he is seventy years old; the ci-devant young man is in his dotage; and as he has married his Mme. Evrard, he may last for a long while yet. As the hairdresser gave the woman thirty thousand francs, his bit of real estate has cost him, first and last, more than a million, and the house at this day is worth eight or ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... occasion. I went out of my senses immediately; became a mere driveller next day, on receipt of a little lace-edged sheet of note-paper, 'Favoured by papa. To remind'; and passed the intervening period in a state of dotage. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... afferent organs. In these cases the recollections which are not altogether lost sometimes reappear as hallucinations. The hallucinations of madness, in its various forms of dementia, idiocy, and dotage, are all, apart from their morbid and organic conditions, derived from the same source which produces myths, dreams, and normal hallucinations; the objective entification of images is due to the innate faculty of the perception, which leads to the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... who had the smallest pretensions to common sense, could be jealous, either of him or any one of these apes. And yet jealous I am! My dotage, Fairfax, is come very suddenly upon me; and neither you, nor any one of the spirited fellows, whose company I used to delight in, can despise me half so much as I despise myself—A plebeian!—A—! I could drink gall, eat my elbows, renounce all my gods, and turn Turk!—Ay, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... part this very note of undisguised vanity in the man that made it difficult to keep one's eyes off him: it tickled the sense of humour, and challenged the curiosity. What would his state of mind be, who, in the dotage of the Nineteenth Century, went laboriously out of his way to cultivate a fragmentary ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... same stern order doth apply To the pranks of this remote age! We are sure alike to be thrust by, In our nonage, and our dotage. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... 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, liked her none the less for her ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... for he exercised despotic rule over his wife's peasant father, the most fervent of his admirers. His mother seemed to have put the last of her strength into the arrangement of that "marriage of convenience." She had fallen into a senile decrepitude that bordered on dotage. Her sole evidence of being alive was her habit of staying in church until the doors were closed and she could stay no longer. At home she did nothing but recite the rosary, mumbling away in some ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... spiritual abstraction and renunciation, having first opened thy pure and lotus-like heart—the only place where the multiform Vishnu of universal knowledge may be seen! It is for this, O learned Rishi, by the grace of God neither all-destroying Death, nor dotage that causeth the decay of the body, hath any power over thee! When neither the sun, nor the moon, nor fire, nor earth, nor air, nor sky remains, when all the world being destroyed looketh like one vast ocean, when the Gods and Asuras and the great Uragas are annihilated, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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 to the Rev. Mr Cole, in 1781, he announces its arrival, and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Kingdom-come, is yo' think I'se come ter ma dotage? When is I see you a cryin' like dis befo'? Not sense yo' was kitin' roun' de lot an' fall down an' crack yo' haid. Yo' ain' been de yellin', squallin' kind, an' when yo' begins at dis hyar day an' age fer ter shed tears dar's ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... here for, to do your dying here, and I am to pay for your funeral and buy you a hooded cloak... that's what he thinks. I don't think! You won't live to see me do it! If your Julina is so sweet, you'd better make haste and go to her. Was it I who was supposed to look after you in your dotage? She is the pet, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... affections and confirmed vitiosity make me daily do worse. I find in my con- firmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then because I was a child; and, because I commit them still, I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child, before the days of dotage; and stand in need ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... emissaries here—individuals contemptible in intellect, it is true, but cat-like and gliding, who, at her bidding, have endeavoured, as much as in their power has lain, to damp and stifle every genial, honest, loyal and independent thought, and to reduce minds to such a state of dotage as would enable their old Popish mother to do what ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the young man entered into Paris society. Louis XIV. was in his dotage, and at this time paid little attention to men of genius. Arouet soon became popular in the highest circles for his wit and genius. He resolved, much against his father's will, to devote himself to a literary life. One of the first acts of the young man was to fall in love with a rich ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... old General has quite spoil'd thee, nothing makes a Woman so vain, as being flatter'd; your old Lover ever supplies the Defects of Age, with intolerable Dotage, vast Charge, and that which you call Constancy; and attributing all this to your own Merits, you domineer, and throw your Favours in's Teeth, upbraiding him still with the Defects of Age, and cuckold him as often as he deceives your Expectations. But the gay, young, brisk Lover, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... creditable to the vanquished. As for the character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words, "the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and fierce endeavor. Men who, twenty years ago, would not cease their shoveling to save their lives, now play in the streets with children. Their long, Micawber-like waiting after the exhaustion of the placers has brought on an exaggerated form of dotage. I heard a group of brawny pioneers in the street eagerly discussing the quantity of tail required for a boy's kite; and one graybeard undertook the sport of flying it, volunteering the information that he was a boy, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... I can say is that if I had died before this chance, I had lived a blessed time. I perceive more and more that I'm obsolete. I'm in my dotage; I prattle of the good old times, and the new spirit of the age flouts me. Miss Effie, do ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... this age, the historian, when writing the history of these times, will ascribe the attempt of the President to enforce the Lecompton resolution upon an unwilling people to the fading intellect, the petulant passion and the trembling dotage of an old man on the verge of ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... He stated, to 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... acquainted with Intrigues of State at home, that has read Plays and Histories and Gazettes; that I say a Gentleman thus accomplished and embellished within and without and all over, should ever live to that unhappy dotage as at last to dishonour his grey hairs and his venerable age with such childish and impotent endeavours at wit and ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... "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 ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... for to be his page, took pity on the disgraceful situation into which, by his merry contrivance, he had brought his Titania and threw some of the juice of the other flower into her eyes; and the fairy queen immediately recovered her senses, and wondered at her late dotage, saying how she now loathed the sight of the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... confidants, with one exception, were singularly void of wit and the love of jesting. His sister was grave; his father gradually sinking into dotage; Coleridge was immersed in religious subtilties and poetic dreams; and Charles Lloyd, sad and logical and analytical, was the antithesis of all that is lively and humorous. But thoughts and images stole in from other quarters; ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... getting in my dotage—brain a little cracked—and all that. I'm a poor chap possessed of a foolish and wicked delusion. Mean well, but head rickety. Sometimes I really think I must be crazy, with all the world against me about the German danger. They call me Jeremiah and Mother Goose rolled into one. But, by ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... 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 and ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... inconceivable how they could have been composed by a man of only twenty—his age when he wrote them. They have no nature—all the sour cream of cantharides. I should have suspected Buffon of writing them on the death-bed of his detestable dotage. I had never redde this edition, and merely looked at them from curiosity and recollection of the noise they made, and the name they have left to Lewis. But they could do no harm, except * ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... which many of our patients over in England would be willing to pay quite large sums. The large room was lit by two candles and a melancholy lamp, there was no tablecloth, the spoons were of pewter, with the bowls half gone, and the knives were in their dotage. But the scales had fallen from our eyes, and we realized what trifles these things are. Madame, the genius who presided over our domestic affairs, and many other affairs as well, and her assistants, had produced from somewhere food, good ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... history of the most remarkable acts passed, the parties 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 Sir, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Harihar seems to have fallen into a state of dotage, and his three sons by Mahisi rose upon their aged parent, and put him in confinement. In this difficulty he applied to Adanuka, the wife of Chhatrapati, one of these unnatural sons, and promised, ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... legislative branches. But we have made them independent of the nation itself. They are irremovable, but by their own body, for any depravities of conduct, and even by their own body for the imbecilities of dotage. The justices of the inferior courts are self-chosen, are for life, and perpetuate their own body in succession for ever, so that a faction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county, can never be broken up, but hold their county in chains, for ever indissoluble. Yet these justices ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... "Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man! Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images Here represent their shadowy presences, 280 May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn, In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright Of conscience, for their long offended might, For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries, Unlawful magic, and enticing lies. Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch! Mark how, possess'd, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... 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 his disgust, gazing at them long after ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... who, after conference with his minister, should declare that he could not conscientiously receive the bread and wine kneeling, might receive them sitting. Mew, Bishop of Winchester, an honest man, but illiterate, weak even in his best days, and now fast sinking into dotage, protested against this concession, and withdrew from the assembly. The other members continued to apply themselves vigorously to their task: and no more secessions took place, though there were great differences of opinion, and though the debates were sometimes warm. The highest churchmen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so W. Hewer tells me, he hears this morning that all the town is full of the discourse that the officers of the Navy shall be all turned out, but honest Sir John Minnes; who, God knows, is fitter to have been turned out himself than any of us, doing the King more hurt; by his dotage and folly than all the rest can do by their knavery, if they had a mind to it. This day I have the news that my sister was married on Thursday last to Mr. Jackson; so that work is, I hope, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... in the old nook by the hearth, apparently in a kind of dotage doze; but on the third, he began to poke about, hobbled into the dairy, peered into ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... his share, too, in the disaster. But Sunderland had no notion of accepting Marlborough's opinion of him. Sunderland had no reverence for any of God's creatures, and with Marlborough safe out of the room, snarled something about an old fellow in his dotage. This much enlivened the quarrel, and they parted in some ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... this assertion, it was observed, that probably the king would not have been so forward in creating his grandson prince of Wales, if he had not been forced into this step by his parliament; for Edward in his old age fell into a sort of love dotage, and gave himself entirely up to the management of his mistress, Alice Pierce, and his second son, the duke of Lancaster; a circumstance that raised a most reasonable jealousy in the Black Prince, at that time on his death-bed, who could not but be anxious about the safety and right of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... I took for Maudlin, And a cruse of cockle pottage, And a thing thus—tall, Sky bless you all, I fell into this dotage. I slept not till the Conquest; Till then I never waked; Till the roguish boy Of love where I lay, Me ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Eastern world, or, at any rate, that portion of them which helped to make its history, either existed no longer or had sunk into their dotage. They had worn each other out in the centuries of their prime, Chaldaeans and Assyrians fighting against Cossaeans or Elamites, Egyptians against Ethiopians and against Hittites, Urartians, Armaeans, the peoples of Lebanon and of Damascus, the Phoenicians, Canaanites and Jews, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... exchanged one glance of consternation, and the fancied security in which they had dwelt, as fragile as a crystal sphere, was shattered in an instant. The old man was broken by his illness, his recent hardships. He was verging on his dotage. His senile folly might well cost them their lives ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... very easy to make mistakes, and nothing is more natural than for a mistake to grow into a miracle. In an ignorant age, history for the most part depended upon memory. It was handed down from the old in their dotage, to the young without judgment. The old always thought that the early days were wonderful—that the world was wearing out because they were. The past looked at through the haze of memory, became exaggerated, gigantic. Their fathers were stronger ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the revolution in the latter end of his life, he became somewhat inimical and unfriendly to dissenters[264], at least some of those who professed to own and adhere unto the same cause and testimony that he himself had contended and suffered somewhat for; whether this proceeded from the dotage of old age (as some would have it) or from mistaken principles, or any thing else, we cannot, and ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... by leaps and bounds to an appalling total. Alice found two grey hairs in her red-gold locks. Will had to use glasses for reading fine print at night. From their point of view, decrepitude, senility, dotage stared them in the face, while the bright voyage of life which they were resolved to make only together, was threatened with shipwreck among the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... map, as old Melotte poised his skinny finger above it and peered eagerly up into his face from the depths of his scraggly white hair. It was little enough Tom knew about military affairs and he thought that this lonesome old weaver was in his dotage. But surely this new road could be for but one purpose, and that was the quick transfer of troops from the Alsatian front to the Swiss border. And the sudden conscription of women and girls for the making of the road seemed plausible enough. Could it be that ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... 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 same person, only ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not my former dotage Make thee an unbeliever; this my vow Shall never on my soul be satisfied With my ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... be done." For Merlin, now grown an old man in his dotage, had fallen under the spell of a damsel of the court named Nimue. With her he soon departed from the King, and evermore went with her wheresoever she went. Ofttimes he wished to break away from her, but he was so held that he could not be out of her presence. ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... I must break, or lose myself in dotage' (Antony and Cleopatra)" This he added from old habit. "I'll quote everything I can think of to D., just to make her think I have forgotten her wish that I should leave off quoting; and if that is not ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... of the throne, of whom six are seldom living at the same time. No Prince is ever appointed under the age of fourteen (twenty-seven) or over that of sixteen (thirty). No Campta, has ever abdicated; but they seldom live to fall into that sort of inert indolence which may be called the dotage of their race. The nature of their functions seems to preserve their mental activity longer than that of others; and probably they are not permitted to live when they have become manifestly unfit or incapable ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... anguish and cries; to be the toy of ignorance, of error, of necessity, of sickness, of malice, of all passions; to return step by step to that imbecility whence one sprang; from the moment when we lisp our first words, down to the moment when we mumble the words of our dotage, to live among rascals and charlatans of every kind; to lie expiring between a man who feels your pulse, and another man who frets and wearies your head; not to know whence one comes, nor why one has come, nor whither one is going—that is what ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... of an edition in which I profess to give nothing but my choicest fish, picked, gutted, and cleaned, please to get some one to write them out and send them, with my compliments, to the editor of the New Monthly Magazine. But if you think of them as I do (most probably from parental dotage for my last born) let them ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... this new structure there should be neither clock nor dial, but that according to the opportunities and incident occasions all their hours should be disposed of; for, said Gargantua, the greatest loss of time that I know is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
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