Laudator Temporis Acti

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (1935; rpt. New York: The Ecco Press, 1979), p. 215:

I have spoken with some contempt of scholars and scholarship. Nevertheless during all my life I have been aware—or it might be more true to say that I have had the feeling, since never till this moment have I put it into words—that there are in this world only two earthly paradises. The one is in Provence with what has survived of the civilizations of the Good King [René of Anjou, 1409-1480], of the conte-fablistes, of the Troubadours and of the painters of Avignon of the Popes. The other is the Reading Room of the British Museum.

It is—it has always been—to me delightful, soothing like the thought of a blessed oasis in the insupportable madhouse for apes that is our civilization, to remember that, rage the journalists how they may, there at the other end of the scale sit in an atmosphere of immutable calm, in that vast, silent place, all those half-brothers of the pen intent on the minutiae of the arts, the sciences and of pure thought. I think they must be the next to most happy people in the world, bending above their desks whilst the great clock marks the negligible hours of the Next to Best Great Good Place.

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