Laudator Temporis Acti

C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greaves (January 9, 1930):

What a glory-hole is the commentary of an old author. One minute you are puzzling out a quotation from a French medieval romance: the next, you are being carried back to Plato: then a scrap of medieval law: then something about geomancy: and manuscripts, and the signs of the Zodiac, and a modern proverb 'reported by Mr Snooks to be common in Derbyshire', and the precession of the equinoxes, and an Arabian optician (born at Balk in 1030), five smoking room stories, the origins of the doctrine of immaculate conception, and why St Cecilia is the patroness of organists. So one is swept from East to West, and from century to century, equally immersed in each oddity as it comes up, and equally sudden in ones flight to the next: like the glimpses (oh how I hate the word vignette) that you get from an express train, when the cart going under the bridge seems to be a little world in itself, until it is replaced—instantaneously—by the horses running away from the line in the next field.

A glory-hole is "a receptacle (as a drawer, room, etc.) in which things are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness" (Oxford English Dictionary, sense 1.a).