Be wise with speed; A fool at forty is a fool indeed.

The couplet urges urgency in self-improvement: wisdom should be pursued quickly, not postponed. The second line sharpens the admonition by treating forty as a moral and intellectual deadline—an age by which life’s experience ought to have taught discernment. If someone remains a “fool” then, the implication is that folly has hardened into character rather than being a temporary youthful error. In Young’s moralizing, aphoristic mode, the lines function as a memento of time’s irreversibility and a call to convert experience into judgment before habit and complacency make change unlikely.