Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“What then is to be done? Be wise with speed; A fool at forty is a fool indeed.”
- Date
- 1725–1728
- Local voice
- Authorial persona / framed maxim · Edward Young (satirical speaker)
Meaning of “What then is to be done? Be wise…”
Young’s satirical couplet urges people not to postpone the cultivation of judgment until age has made long-standing folly harder to excuse.
Where does it come from?
Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, Satire II, from the seven-satire sequence issued in the 1720s and represented in Project Gutenberg #18827. The couplet belongs to Young’s satirical moral persona; its age-based sting is period rhetoric rather than an empirical claim about people at forty.
Why the local voice matters
Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, Satire II. The couplet belongs to Young’s satirical authorial persona and period moral argument.