Laudator Temporis Acti

Hartley Coleridge (1795-1849), "The Books of My Childhood," Essays and Marginalia, Vol. I (London: Edward Moxton, 1851), pp. 343-347 (at 343):

I am a man of small reading and small experience, yet much of my little has lain in bye-paths, where few, perhaps, have strayed at all; still fewer wandered with observant eyes. I have been a loiterer out of the daily ways of men so long, that I scarcely know whether I be in or out of the beaten track. It is easy for the ignorant to find curiosities—for to ignorance, just awakened by the desire of knowledge, everything is new and strange. Often, in the course of my devious peregrinations, have I cried εὕρηκα when stumbling on some theory old as Pythagoras; often should have blushed to find my brightest discoveries, either copy-head commonplaces, or paradoxes of puzzle-books. I have hailed, as new-found lands, the fog-banks that have misled bewildered barques in centuries past; and brought home, as special rarities, wares with which the market has long been glutted.

Id. (at 344):

A well-filled library, though a precious, is yet a melancholy sight. How few of those folios shall I ever read! How few can any one man read aright! How many are little likely, in this generation at least, to be read aright at all; and yet how much might be derived from their pages, had we a just value for the salvages of time!

Johann Boxbarth (1671-1727), Bibliothek