Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
This was a common editorial convention in the 19th century, because the "!" was not regarded as being the end of a sentence, but merely accentuating a word within the sentence.
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+1
The sentence is really "O sage, what are we to do?", except the author wanted to accentuate the "O sage" and did so by replacing the coma with an exclamation mark. Capitializing the "W" in "what" makes the "O sage!" a sentence fragment.
Today, we usually consider exclamation marks and question marks as modified versions of full-stops or periods, but I've seen them used as a replacement for a comma in older books.