Final Edition

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THE three sons of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, resembled each other chiefly in the possession of more literary facility than was good for them. A. C., who wrote volumes of meditative and inspirational essays and published them at the rate of three a year, contrived to get himself so firmly established in the minds of a large public in a largely fictional character that he never dared print a line of sincere disclosure of his true personality, which was astringent, ironic, and rather often morose. Hugh, who became a Roman Catholic priest, turned out a shelfful of adroit religious propaganda in the form of novels that hardly anyone now looks at. E. F., the most stable and best balanced of the three, discovered when his life was well advanced that his light, popularly successful novels had for years been ‘turning over and over the patch of ground I had already prepared, and setting in it cuttings from my old plants.’ The present rather tired volume is more anecdote than anything else: a source-book for the literary and social historian, for the Bensons went everywhere, knew everybody, and had the confidences of a roster of notables that looks like the English Who’s Who.