Laudator Temporis Acti

D.B. Wyndham Lewis (1891-1969), Ronsard (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), pp. 7-8:

Pater, that homely nuncio of the Graces, whose moustache ruined Max Beerbohm's first impressions of Oxford, whose doctrine of Art and continuous excitement and Life burning with a hard gem-like flame had such a deleterious effect on romantic Oxford youth, is blunter than some of his fellow-thinkers, who disguise with a vast parade of allusive congees and salamalecs, becks and courtesies, side-glancings and œillades, cadenzas and fioriture, the essential Whig grievance against the Middle Ages, the great modern growl; namely that medieval man, driven in blinkers by the Catholic Church (which will have nothing to do with the philosophies, ancient or modem, which minister so cosily to human self-idolatry) thought far too much about God and far too little of his own marvellous, imperial, jolly self. Numbers of the men of the Renaissance agreed on this and thought Millennium had come,—with far better excuse than modern dons. Erasmus' cry to Budé, which I have quoted at the head of this chapter, is the cry of Wordsworth at the French Revolution. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven"—a quaint enough cry it sounds to anyone who has ever lived under the Revolution's final flowering, the late Third Republic, that paradise of crooks. The deistic Rabelais makes Gargantua write to Pantagruel: "For this [medieval] time was darksome, obscured with clouds of Ignorance, and savouring the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed good Literature; which in my age hath by the divine goodnesse been restored unto its former light and dignity." The atheist Etienne Dolet concurs: "Now men have learned to know themselves, now their eyes are opened to the universal light." This sentiment has been ritually repeated ever since by a cloud of authorities who have also had no doubt about it whatsoever.

Erasmus' cry to Budé quoted at the head of the chapter (p. 1) was "Immortal God! what a world I see dawning! Why am I not young again?" (letter 534 Allen, February 21, 1517: Deum immortalem, quod saeculum video breui futurum! vtinam contingat reiuuenescere!).