Then Old Age and Experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.

These lines are from John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s satiric poem “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” (1670s), written in the milieu of Restoration court culture. Rochester—famous for libertine wit, skepticism, and abrasive moral satire—targets what he presents as the pretensions and self-deceptions of “reason” when it is used to rationalize pride, ambition, and philosophical systems. The poem’s speaker contrasts fallible human rationality with instinct and appetite, and repeatedly depicts the “wise” man’s lifelong quest for truth as ending in disillusion. The quoted passage comes near the poem’s close, where the seeker’s long intellectual labor culminates not in enlightenment but in a bitter recognition at the point of death.

The passage compresses a bleak moral: the pursuit of wisdom, status, or certainty can become a lifelong error recognized only when it is too late to amend. “Old Age and Experience” are personified as grim guides who escort the protagonist to death while forcing a final reckoning—his “search” has been “painful and so long,” yet it yields the devastating conclusion that he has lived wrongly throughout. In Rochester’s satiric frame, this is not simply personal regret but an indictment of human vanity and the tendency to mistake elaborate reasoning for genuine understanding. The lines underscore the poem’s cynicism about philosophical self-confidence and the tragic irony of late-arriving insight.