I am obliged to you for sending me your petition, but I am returning it without signature. I confess I am attached to the current forms of words, and <I> also I am what you have often heard of but perhaps not often seen, a real conservative, who thinks change an evil in itself.I don't have access to Burnett's edition of Housman's letters in its entirety, but it appears that he doesn't identify Dr. Barnes, who must be William Emery Barnes (1859-1939), Hulsean Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, and member of the Simplified Spelling Society.
"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, July 17, 2017
A Real Conservative
A.E. Housman, letter to Dr. Barnes (June 5, 1914), in The Letters of A.E. Housman, ed. Archie Burnett, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 326 (cf. p. xvi: "Housman's cancellations are placed within angle brackets..."):