Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), Hamlet and Orestes: A Study in Traditional Types (New York: Oxford University Press, 1914 = British Museum, Annual Shakespeare Lecture), p. 26:

[I]t seems only natural that those subjects, or some of those subjects, which particularly stirred the interest of primitive men, should still have an appeal to certain very deep-rooted human instincts. I do not say that they will always move us now; but, when they do, they will tend to do so in ways which we recognize as particularly profound and poetical. This comes in part from their original quality; in part, I suspect, it depends on mere repetition. We all know the emotional charm possessed by famous and familiar words and names, even to hearers who do not understand the words and know little of the bearers of the names. I suspect that a charm of that sort lies in these stories and situations, which are—I cannot quite keep clear of metaphor—deeply implanted in the memory of the race, stamped, as it were, upon our physical organism. We have forgotten their faces and their voices; we say that they are strange to us. Yet there is something in us which leaps at the sight of them, a cry of the blood which tells us we have known them always.