Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Dotage   Listen
Dotage

noun
1.
Mental infirmity as a consequence of old age; sometimes shown by foolish infatuations.  Synonyms: second childhood, senility.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Dotage" Quotes from Famous Books



... that name she suddenly remembered 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 also respected ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... strange thing happened. When we had taken my grandfather to the Hall in June, his dotage seemed to settle upon him. He became a trembling old man, at times so peevish that we were obliged to summon with an effort what he had been. He was suspicious and fault-finding with Scipio and the other servants, though they were never so busy for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... 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, he is ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... his 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 fellow had ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... Cetoxa, contemptuously. "They are out of fashion; nothing now goes down but scepticism and philosophy. And what, after all, do these rumours, when sifted, amount to? They have no origin but this,—a silly old man of eighty-six, quite in his dotage, solemnly avers that he saw this same Zanoni seventy years ago (he himself, the narrator, then a mere boy) at Milan; when this very Zanoni, as you all see, is at least as young as you ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... relieved when her carriage arrived. She felt that her presence was preventing Dora's absolute surrender of herself to thoughts of her lover, and all the way home she marveled at the girl's infatuation, and wondered if it would be possible for her to fall into such a dotage of love for any man. She answered this query positively—"No, if I should lose my heart, I shall not therefore lose my head"—and then, before she could finish assuring herself of her determinate wisdom, some mocking lines she ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr

... 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

... earnest labor. Even that usage of attain which has been 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 ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... Madame Raquin more calm, she busied herself about her, advising her to rise, and go down to the shop. The old mercer had almost fallen into dotage. The abrupt apparition of her niece had brought about a favourable crisis that had just restored her memory, and the consciousness of things and beings around her. She thanked Suzanne for her attention. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... no grudge 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 and ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... author's style. That style is diffuse and turgid, marked in an eminent degree with the prevailing faults of the sixth century, an age of literary decay, when the language of Cicero and Virgil was falling into its dotage. There is much ill-timed display of irrelevant learning, and a grievous absence of simplicity and directness, in the "Various Epistles". It must be regarded as a misfortune for Theodoric that his maxims of statesmanship, which were assuredly full of manly sense ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... she. "You look at that lean figure, and the wizened-up old hawk's face, with the white hair all round it, and you'd think that he was in his dotage. But when he talks—I don't ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair

... and see, the skull and earth are vanished. This is beyond melancholy. I do dare my fate To do its worst. Now to my sister's lodging And sum up all these horrors: the disgrace The prince threw on me; next the piteous sight Of my dead brother; and my mother's dotage; And last this terrible vision: all these Shall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good, Or I will drown this weapon ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... 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

... 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 incauti studioque ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence

... having for ten years borne the title of Surgeon to the Queen. Before he returned from Louviers to Paris, the weakness of Anne of Austria had been tempted into granting another commission named by his opponents, consisting of an old fool in his dotage, one Diafoirus of Rouen, and his nephew, both attached to the priesthood. These did not fail to discover that the Louviers affair was supernatural, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... 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

... to dare to doubt your wisdom. It's a wise man, or a fool, can speak for himself, Let alone for others, in this haphazard life. But give me a young fool, rather than an old— A plucky plunger, than a canny crone Who's old enough to ken she doesn't ken. You're right: for doubting is a kind of dotage: Experience ages and decays; while folk Who never doubt themselves die young—at ninety. Age never yet brought gumption to a ninny: And you cannot reckon up a stranger's wits By counting his bare patches and grey hairs: It's ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

... 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, his lashless eyelids ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... more to say, sir, I followed to the lake where I had so often been told that Natty dwelt, and found him maintaining his old master in secret; for even he could not bear to exhibit to the world, in his poverty and dotage, a man whom a whole people once ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... 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 crosses almost without giving a sign of movement, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... 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. But he ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... the king himself. In answer to 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, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... 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 ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... contrary, Newton had been described as one who 'had been a searcher of the Scriptures from his youth' (ii. 314). Brewster says that 'some foreign writers have endeavoured to shew that his theological writings were composed at a late period of life, when his mind was in its dotage.' It was not so, however. Ib. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... I am in my dotage. Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... 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 ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... 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

... poor old soul loved her boy. It seemed as though she loved him the better, the worse he behaved; and that he grew more in her favour, the more he grew out of favour with the world. Mothers are foolish, fond-hearted beings; there's no reasoning them out of their dotage; and, indeed, this poor woman's child was all that was left to love her in this world;—so we must not think it hard that she turned a deaf ear to her good friends, who sought to prove to her that Dolph would ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... discipline, 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... give your neck, Each splendid shoulder, both those breasts of yours, 125 That this were undone! Killing! Kill the world, So Luca lives again!—aye, lives to sputter His fulsome dotage on you—yes, and feign Surprise that I return at eve to sup, When all the morning I was loitering here— 130 Bid me dispatch my business and begone. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... Adm. Is death alike then to the young and old? Pher. Man's due is one life, not to borrow more. Adm. Thine drag thou on and out-tire heaven's age! Pher. Darest thou to curse thy parents, nothing wrong'd? Adm. Parents in dotage lusting still to live! {760} Pher. And thou—what else but life with this corpse buyest? Adm. This corpse—the symbol of thy infamy! Pher. For us she died not; that thou canst not say! Adm. Ah! mayst thou some time come to need my aid! Pher. Wed many ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... 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. ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte

... and bitter amusement. "Profited, did ye say? I think your dotage is surely upon you—you that have sunk nigh all your fortune and all that you had with me in this thieving venture—d'ye talk ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... 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 danger, or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... the headlands comes the day, Though moon and planet on a sky of gold, Chequered with orange and vermilion-stoled, Have floated long before the sun's first ray Has shot across the waters to display Amalfi in her dotage; as of old His beams lit up her splendours manifold, Her quays and palaces that fringed the bay. His smile makes every barren hill-side blush In rose and purple for the glories fled, As early watchers note th' encroaching flush From proud Ravello to Atrani spread, And curse ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... was in everything governed and directed by my mother-in-law. In fact, whenever there is great disparity of years between husband and wife, the younger is, I believe, always possessed of absolute power over the elder; for superstition itself is a less firm support of absolute power than dotage. ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... he had once held through her influence, notwithstanding the unbleached stains of his former treasons. Beauty is too apt to exert a peremptory claim to absolute dominion; and, not content with conjugal affection, requires obsequious dotage. The Queen's views being all limited to the routine of a court, unhappily indisposed her from acting the part of a faithful wife in this critical emergency, and induced her to use all her power to make the King depend more for advice upon herself and her favourites, than on those sages who presided ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... soever he had upon him, and to resign himself entirely up to Hermione. I know not what new charms he had found by frequent conversation with her, and being uninterrupted by the sight of any other ladies; but it is most certain, my lord, that he grew to that excess of love, or rather dotage, (if love in one so young can be called so) that he languished for her, even while he possessed her all: he died, if obliged by company to retire from her an hour, at the end of which, being again brought ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... Am I in my dotage, think you? I saw my boy, and he was pale, and had blood on his hands, and it ran down his beard and dripped on his vest. You can't deceive me! What is the matter with my poor boy? I will see him! Give ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... true that M. Jules Simon considers himself fortunate in not having to marry a girl educated in a French college; but I think I have discovered the reason for this aversion. He is getting in his dotage, otherwise he would experience no repugnance in proposing to such a girl, provided, of course, that, along with an education, she was at the same time pretty ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... 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 believe anything that is not (I do not say merely in accordance with their own character, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... 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, where he was received ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... or, 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 trusty ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... part well," admitted Cameron. "And McNabb has played his part well—whatever that part is. Orcutt said he was losing his grip, was in his dotage. Well, he will not be the first man that has had to change his mind. He has gone to inspect the mill site and will return day after to-morrow. Wentworth accompanied him. I imagine we will have ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx

... heard of 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

... hen who desires to set for the purpose of getting out an early edition of spring chickens that I am averse to. It is the aged hen, who is in her dotage, and whose eggs, also, are in their second childhood. Upon this hen I shower my anathemas. Overlooked by the pruning hook of time, shallow in her remarks, and a wall-flower in society, she deposits her quota of eggs in the catnip ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... 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

... the flowing locks and 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 resemblance to—say a ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... says, you would be more than a hundred"—"That is not impossible," said he, laughing; "but it is, I allow, still more possible that Madame de Gergy, for whom I have the greatest respect, may be in her dotage."—"You have given her an elixir, the effect of which is surprising. She declares that for a long time she has felt as if she was only four-and-twenty years of age; why don't you give some to the King?"—"Ah! Madame," said ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... Polonius,] Doctor Johnson describes Polonius as "a man bred in courts, exercised in business, stored with observation, confident in his knowledge, proud of his eloquence, and declining into dotage. A man positive and confident, because he knows his mind was once strong, and knows not that it is become weak." The idea of dotage encroaching upon wisdom will solve all the phenomena of ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare

... may he swill, this patriarch of the dull, The drowsy Mum—But touc not Maro's skull! His holy barbarous dotage sought to doom, Good heaven! th' immortal classics to the tomb!— Those sacred lights shall bid new genius rise 45 When all Rome's saints have rotted from the skies. Be these your guides, if at ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen

... you of pardon, for that I meant not to offend you; and in very deed, I scarce ever do remember that you are not my countrywoman. You are good enough for an English woman, and I would you were—There! I am about to make yet again a fool of myself. Heed not, I pray you, an old man in his dotage." ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... 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 ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... found more than his match. Some thought it not a very hard matter to "pull the wool over his eyes." The question has more than once been asked, "Is it possible that he can be so befogged?" Why not? He is an old man, between seventy and eighty, of great self-esteem, perhaps entering his dotage. If such a man be placed in so responsible a position, what ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby

... 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 me for my brother; a blunder which for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various

... quite accustomed to converse intimately and at the greatest length with the most distinguished persons. If you cannot discriminate between hay fever and imbecility, I can only say that your advanced years carry with them the inevitable penalty of dotage. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... between two extremes of panic-striking grandeur, in the ascending scale (insomuch that the Turkish Sultan was supposed to be charged in the Apocalypse with the dissolution of the Christian thrones), and in the descending scale of paralytic dotage tempting its own instant ruin. In speculating on the causes of the extraordinary terror which the Turks once inspired, it is amusing, and illustrative of the revolutions worked by time, to find it imputed, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words, "You are not very successful ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... this cane of mine, they are realities to my inner conscience. Within every one of us there lives both a Don Quixote and a Sancho Panza to whom we hearken by turns; and though Sancho most persuades us, it is Don Quixote that we find ourselves obliged to admire.... But a truce to this dotage!—and let us go to see Madame de Gabry about some matters more important than ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... gentlemen talked above all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he wasn't somewhere else, as good as said (but all the while saying something else and gorging like an ogre), 'I'm ill, I'm feeble, look at me, ruin that I am. Me, I'm in my dotage.' They were all seeking inside themselves to find diseases to wrap themselves up in—'I wanted to go to the war, but I've a rupture, two ruptures, three ruptures.' Ah, non, that feast!—'The orders that speak of sending everybody ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... has so little good to hope 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 fellow, who hates ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... Ever since the silver age of Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impulse to the Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is true, indeed, that unknown mediaeval carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... 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 ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... stopped my father on Penmanmawr to tell him that Lovell had given him Lazy Lawrence, was drowned with many others crossing the Ferry in a storm. The old harper who used to be the delight of travellers is now in a state of dotage. There was no harper at Bangor: the waiter told us "they were no profit to master, and was always in the way in the passage; so master never lets ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... 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, nor any ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... death as a leap in the dark; but for my part, I look on it as a welcome resting place, where virtuous old age may throw down his pains and aches, wipe off his old scores, and begin anew on an innocent and happy state that shall last for ever. What weakness to wish to live to such ghastly dotage, as to frighten the children, and make even the dogs to bark at us as we totter along the streets. Most certainly then, there is a time when, to a good man, death is a great mercy even to his body; and as to his soul, why should he tremble ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... Pitt 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 polite ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... a thought 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 found, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... though they cripple or distort their minds; are not these 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 of age? ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... 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

... The happy 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 ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... political bondage of the fathers. But I'm afraid I am older than I thought. I have an old man's fears. I have had enough—too much—of the contact of men. Now this next idea is fanciful—another proof that I'm old—in my dotage, perhaps." His tone was gently playful. "I told you the other day that you seemed to typify the young strength of the State. So I'm going to appeal to you, young man—I cannot very well appeal to the rest, for they are not in the secret—I'm going to beg of you, Mr. Second Generation, ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... 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

... indignant genius, branding the audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage during the Christmas ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... 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 ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... 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 ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... is usually called dotage is not the weak point of all old men, but only of such as are distinguished ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... Atlantic, could not believe that her peace was in any way assailed. The 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," ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... he discovers it, Woe to poor 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, shipwreck'd Upon ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer

... 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday

... become of the girl's soft, tender heart, which but yesterday had been ready for self-sacrifice if only she might secure the well-being of those she loved? Was she, Euryale, in her dotage, that she could be so deceived by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 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 ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... 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 ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... 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: ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... 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 ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: "Let us be friends." It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: "Let us agree not to step on each other's feet." Mr. Beecher, having done away ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... 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 ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... any person, she never failed to reproach them, with all the bitterness of wit she was mistress of, with such malice, and ill-nature, that she was hated, not only by all the world, but by her own children and servants: The extremes of prodigality, and covetousness, of love, and hatred, of dotage, and fondness, met in her. A woman of this temper will be at no loss for the means of effecting any one's ruin, and having now conceived an aversion to our poetess, she was resolved to drive her ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber

... man, who, after propounding a theory in his younger days which was at least as reasonable as most of the existing theories, had the misfortune to outlive his usefulness and lay his doctrine open to ridicule by the unreasonable teachings of his dotage. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... 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

... whom hours like these await, Who set unclouded in the gulfs 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 a driv'ller and a show. [ee]The teeming mother, anxious for her race, Begs for each birth the fortune of a face; Yet Vane could tell what ills from beauty spring; And Sedley curs'd the form that pleas'd a king. Ye nymphs ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... sharing 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

... old fellows rarely drift outside the groove of our fixed orbit. One by one we drop out, and as each one passes beyond it shortens the orbit of the others. The circle is always contracting—never expanding. The last one of us will be found in his dotage never venturing beyond the circle of his own fireside until he, too, shall answer ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... parricide, or incest, or sacrilege, or the like plagues, or when they terrify some guilty soul with the conscience of his crimes; the other, but nothing like this, that which comes from me and is of all other things the most desirable; which happens as often as some pleasing dotage not only clears the mind of its troublesome cares but renders it more jocund. And this was that which, as a special blessing of the gods, Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, wished to himself, that he might be the less ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus

... 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 ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who has looked behind the screen of political hypocrisies; the knowledge of which the essence is distilled in Bacon's 'Essays;' or the knowledge of which Polonius seems to have retained many shrewd scraps even when he had fallen into his dotage. In reading 'Clarissa' or 'Eugenie Grandet' we are aware that the soul of Richardson or Balzac has transmigrated into another shape; that the author is projected into his character, and is really giving us one phase of his own sentiments. In reading Fielding we are listening to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... ambition not to lead, but, with a slave's adulation, to obey and to follow all the caprices of the public mind—described Mr. Wordsworth as resembling, in the quality of his mind, an old nurse babbling in her paralytic dotage to sucking babies. If this insult was peculiarly felt by Mr. Wordsworth, it was on a consideration of the unusual imbecility of him who offered it, and not because in itself it was baser or more insolent than the language held by the majority of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... changes not! Long, long ago He won the treasure of eternal youth; Yours is the dotage—if you want to ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old man in his dotage...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... soberly; indeed, there were few left for her to give it to. The Herritons were out of the question; they would not even let her write to Irma, though Irma was occasionally allowed to write to her. Mrs. Theobald was rapidly subsiding into dotage, and, as far as she could be definite about anything, had definitely sided with the Herritons. And Miss Abbott did likewise. Night after night did Lilia curse this false friend, who had agreed with her that the marriage would "do," and that the Herritons would come ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster

... sparkle on the brook there, and the clouds appear to be of the same commonplace order that go about everywhere. Seventhly, no one can find these footpaths, which probably led nowhere; and as for the little old man with silver buckles on his shoes, it is a story only fit for some one in his dotage. You can't expect grave and considerate men to take your story as it stands; they must consult the Ordnance Survey and Domesday Book; and the fact is, you have not got the shadow of a foundation on which to carry your case into court. I may resent this, but ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... him in his dotage, and the bursar of Hyde made quick work with us, for fear, good Father Shoveller said, that we were come to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and 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 ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... was jolly, but was in his physical and spiritual dotage, yet "Nell," his second wife, was the life of the place, being immensely popular with the Oxford students, who circled about the "Crown" in midnight hours, with hilarious independence, that defied the raids of beadles, watchmen ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... 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 ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct,—at least I must allege something against you both, to excuse my own dotage,— ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... present—absent from my thought. Or when Reflection comes—and come it must— I fear that henceforth 'twill but bring disgust; I am his slave—but, in despite of pride, 'Twere worse than bondage to become his bride. 1130 Oh! that this dotage of his breast would cease! Or seek another and give mine release, But yesterday—I could have said, to peace! Yes, if unwonted fondness now I feign,[hv] Remember—Captive! 'tis to break thy chain; Repay the life that to thy hand I owe; To give thee back to all endeared below, Who share such love ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... roar, waved his hat to it and cried: 'After me!' like a captain to his company, and started off at a gallop, it would have obeyed and followed him. 'After me the Deluge!' should be the rallying cry of the monarchy for the renewal of its youth, not the quavering note of its dotage. That is the motto I am going to put on the title-page ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... 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 ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... 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 in 1368. It was his fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the royal power ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... of 1843 restored San Luis Rey to priestly control, but by that time its spoliation was nearly complete. Padre Zalvidea was in his dotage, and the four hundred Indians had scarcely anything left to them. Two years later the majordomo, appointed by Zalvidea to act for him, turned over the property to his successor, and the inventory shows the frightful wreckage. Of all the vast herds and flocks, only 279 horses, 20 mules, 61 ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... and thirty years ago, when the third George, whom our grandfathers knew in his blind dotage, was a young and sturdy bridegroom; when old Q., whom 1810 found peering from his balcony in Piccadilly, deaf, toothless, and a skeleton, was that gay and lively spark, the Earl of March; when bore and boreish were ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... observed Larry; "where did ye larn English, boy, for ye have the brogue parfict, as me gran'mother used to say to the pig when she got in her dotage (me gran'mother, not the pig), 'only,' says she, 'the words isn't quite distinc'.' Couldn't ye give us a ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... intelligence of 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 ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... general weakness of old people; I have had a twitch of it myself, though certainly it is the highest absurdity, and as sure a proof of dotage as pink-coloured ribands, or even matrimony. Nay, perhaps, there is more to be said in defence of the last; I mean in a childless old man; he may prefer a boy born in his own house, though he knows it is not his own, to disrespectful or worthless nephews or nieces. ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... "Maintain a political controversy only so far as you can convince your fellow citizens of its justice: never offer violence to parent or fatherland." He, it is true, alleges this as his motive for having abstained from politics, because, having found the Athenian people all but in its dotage, and seeing that it could not be ruled by persuasion, or by anything short of compulsion, while he doubted the possibility of persuasion, he looked upon compulsion as criminal. My position was different in this: as the people was not in its dotage, nor the question ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... and some experience in human nature." Saunders puffed at his cigar. He felt that his friend was expecting what he was saying. "Mitchell is getting in his dotage, and he talks very ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... to the tenor of his life for forty years and more, ever since he married and founded that mysterious thing, a family, came this warning thought—None of his blood, no right to anything! It was a luxury then, this notion. An extravagance, a petting of an old man's whim, one of those things done in dotage. His real future was vested in those who had his blood, in whom he would live on when he was gone. He turned away from the bronzes and stood looking at the old leather chair in which he had sat and smoked so many hundreds of cigars. And suddenly he seemed to see her sitting there in her grey ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 'Tis the fuero of the carnival, and dates from the time that Mother Church first fell into her dotage." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... Academe outside the walls. Let Athens' foolish politics go forward as they might, or backward—he would meddle with nothing. It has been brought against him that he did nothing to help his city 'in her old age and dotage'; well, he had the business of thousands of coming years and peoples to attend to, and had no time to be accused, condemned, and executed by a parcel of obstreperous cobblers and tinkers hot-headed over the petty politics of their day. The Gods had done with Athens, and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... Sabinus, encouraged by these omens, which were confirmed by the augurs, told his mother, "that her grandson would be emperor of Rome;" at which she laughed heartily, wondering, she said, "that her son should be in his dotage whilst she continued still in full possession of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... 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 ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... was always a trifle annoyed with himself for not having demanded more of his youth. Griggs, therefore, was a physical insult, any way you looked at him: his very presence in the road behind was a blatant, house-top sort of proclamation that he, Redmond Wrandall, was in his dotage, and that was something Mr. Wrandall would never have admitted if he had had ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... more clearness and precision than any of your modern professors. All such propositions are old—old as the hills, I assure you; and these days in which you live are more suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... should fall, which turned into a shower so soft and piercing, I almost died to see it; at last delivering me a paper—'Here,' (cried he, with a sigh and trembling-interrupted voice) 'read what I cannot tell thee. Oh, Sylvia,' cried he, '—thou joy and hope of all my aged years, thou object of my dotage, how hast thou brought me to my grave with sorrow!' So left me with the paper in my hand: speechless, unmov'd a while I stood, till he awaked me by new sighs and cries; for passing through my chamber, by chance, or ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn



Words linked to "Dotage" :   years, geezerhood, eld, old age, age



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com