Autograph Letter Signed ('W. Rhys Roberts') to Sir Frederick George Kenyon (1863-1952), Director of the British Museum.

Author: 
William Rhys Roberts (1858-1929), Professor of Classics at Leeds University, and associate of J. R. R. Tolkien
Publication details: 
28 January 1918; on letterhead of the University, Leeds.
£85.00
SKU: 5408

Three pages, octavo. Very good on lightly aged paper. Kenyon's paper was 'much enjoyed' when read on Saturday, and there was 'a good attendance'. '[T]he pleasantries were not missed': '1. the confusion of the inexhaustible emender; 2. the thrift of the canny Odysseus in his role of wooer; 3. Burne Jones's Law.' 'At the end some interesting questiosn were asked', for example, 'why second-rate Greek annalists shd. seemingly have been preferred to Herodotus & Thucydides'. In reply Roberts suggests that 'in order fully to appreciate big historians, you needed big men in contact with big affairs & found such men in the great Romans [...] & not among simple Egyptian Greeks cut off from the main stream of the world's movement'. Roberts makes a few more remarks on Kenyon's paper before turning to 'the Business Meeting': 'Our present membership is 170, - & a particularly pleasant thing is that there is so large a proportion of full members, viz. 120, this number exceeding [...] the combined full & associate members whether at Manch[este]r., London, Liverpool, or elsewhere. More cd. be done if I had more leisure. But I find every moment taken up, as I do the secretarial as well as the teaching work of our two Classical Lecturers, Captain P. W. Dodd & Lieut. A. M. Woodward'.