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 civilisations of the Good King, of the conte-fablistes of the Troubadors and of the painters of Avignon of the Popes. The other is the Reading Room of the British Museum.The Good King is RenĂ© of Anjou (1409-1480).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, March 24, 2014
Earthly Paradises
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), p. 215: