Laudator Temporis Acti

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), Europe without Baedeker, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 348 (from Homecoming; Final Reflections, describing a visit to Norman Kemp Smith in Edinburgh):

I remember one man especially, who wanted to talk about nothing but Greek. He came from the country and had had few "advantages," but had made himself a formidable scholar. He now lived retired and alone, in shabby high-ceilinged rooms, and devoted himself to Plato. I had met C.M. Bowra in London and introduced his name, but Kemp Smith's friend was positively shocked at Bowra's recent interest in Russian, as if it were a treason to Greek, and said sharply that the understanding of a single Greek writer like Plato made such demands on the reader that one's whole life was not enough to exhaust him.

Update, from Ian Jackson:

I suspect Kemp Smith's friend was the philosopher Alfred Edward Taylor. (I was unsure of his exact biographical details, but those provided by ODNB accord with Wilson's statements). Russian did seem to have a marked attraction for classicists in the early 20th C. In addition to Bowra, there was Jane Harrison (late in life) and J.D. Duff, who translated Sergei Aksakov's 2 volumes of reminiscences, A Russian Gentleman and Years of Childhood — delightful observant books, wonderfully lacking in all those agonizing qualities that we think of as typically Russian.