Item 129 - Letter from J. H. Whitfield to James Smith

110 Banbury Road, Oxford.—Their finances are tight, and as he has to go to Birmingham at Easter their short trip to Vézelay will probably be his only other excursion. Is sorry Smith can’t come, but they may possibly take a cottage in the summer. Is glad to hear that Smith may ‘insert’ himself in Oxford, though he doesn’t think that the men he names are of sufficient authority to get him work. ‘On the banks of the Cam you likened me to Mr. [H. G.] Wells, because neither of us placed a God in the heavens. On consideration I repudiate the likeness as a merely negative one; it is the filling of the void that is more important.’ Likewise he rejects Smith’s likening of Petrarch to Lawrence or Mussolini, and insists that there must be something wrong in an argument which allows him to couple such disparate names. Agrees with his dispraise of Erasmus.