Voices in Time

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For an old fool to dote, to see an old lecher, what more odious, what can be more absurd? And yet what so common? Who so furious? Some dote then more than ever they did in their youth. How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, bursten-bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, blear-eyed, impotent, rotten old men shall you see flickering still in every place? One gets him a young wife, another a courtesan, and when he can scarce lift his leg over a sill, and hath one foot already in Charon’s boat; when he hath the trembling in his joints, the gout in his feet, a perpetual rheum in his head, “a continuate cough”; his sight fails him, thick of hearing, his breath stinks; all his moisture is dried up and gone, may not spit from him; a very child again, that cannot dress himself, or cut his own meat—yet he will be dreaming of and honing after wenches, what can be more unseemly? Worse it is in women than in men, when she an old widow, a mother so long since, she doth very unseemly seek to marry. Yet while she is so old a crone, a beldam, she can neither see, nor hear, go, nor stand—a mere carcase, a witch—and scarce feel. She caterwauls, and must have a stallion, a champion, she must and will marry again, and betroth herself to some young man that hates to look on, but for her goods—abhors the sight of her, to the prejudice of her good name, her own undoing, grief of friends, and ruin of her children.

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