ABSTRACT
A friend of mine used to say that the most pleasing thing about passing the age of forty was that one ceased to be a man of promise. My Dictionary of Quotations offers me many other pieces of folk wisdom about this particular age: that it is the time by which one should have acquired judgement; that all men over forty are scoundrels; that life begins at forty. The quotations are not merely recording the subjective experience, but also how it appears to others. Shakespeare in his second sonnet could warn his mistress of the approach of old age: When forty winters shall besiege thy brow And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now, Will be a tatter’d weed of small worth held .. .
