Laudator Temporis Acti

D.B. Wyndham Lewis (1891-1969), Ronsard (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), pp. 14-15:

Two ragged Greeks, unable for some reason to find a protector at the Court of France — the Italian market being presumably at saturation-point at this moment — arrive, begging their bread and driven to the last extremity, at Du Thier's door and exhibit their merchandise.

. . . c'estoit du vieux Pindare
Un livret inconnu, et un livre nouveau
Du gentil Simonide éveillé du tombeau.¹

They did not offer this trove to a bibliophile in vain. The courtois, gentil, et débonnaire Du Thier sped them from his library with a "round harmony of golden guineas" to jingle in their purse.

It is easy to imagine the alleluias of such Western intellectuals and dilettanti, on many of whom Christianity sat so lightly that the religion of that far-off pagan world, sun-gilt, marble-white, idealised as a Flaxman vision, seeped unconsciously into their veins, so to speak, as they devoured the manuscript, and hypnotised them. Modern travellers who see for the first time the smiling Cyclades rising at sunset from a level summer sea of violet and lapis-lazuli, rosy with such ethereal loveliness that they shake the heart, know the instant spell of the antique world and can understand dimly how a Renaissance scholar felt on first seizing a Greek codex. Actual palpable enchantment of

Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
   Of water, sheets of summer glass,
   The long divine Peneïan pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,¹

the lofty pure serenity of the virgin Parthenon (though Time has given it by our day a lovelier patina of honey and cream), the grave and gracious sweetness of the Korae on the Acropolis, the musical surges of the wine-dark Aegean, the reedy piping on thyme-scented, crocus-starred uplands of the shepherds of Crotona in a wash of everlasting blue, the veiled Mysteries of Eleusis, the olive-bronze, glistening nakedness of the athletes of Olympia, the songs and torches and cymbals of the procession to the Delian Apollo — no wonder, with all these new visions rushing on the mind, that the splendour of the Gothic and its august mystical harmonies seemed, to long-sated eyes and restless spirits swayed by pride, something belonging to a dead and barbarous past. Homer's dullest catalogues were an incantation.

[p. 14, n.1:]

. . . it was a little unknown book
By ancient Pindar, and a new one
By the gentle Simonides, risen from the tomb.

De Nolhac [Ronsard et l'humanisme (Paris: Champion, 1921), pp. 131-132] identifies these two Greeks tentatively with the brothers Palaeocappa, later employed in the Royal Library at Fontainebleau.

[p. 15, n.1:]

Tennyson ["To Edward Lear on His Travels in Greece," lines 1-4].