Arthur Christopher Benson was one of the most prolific and popular essayists of the Edwardian period. Son of an archbishop of Canterbury, editor of the selected letters of Queen Victoria, and author of "Land of Hope and Glory," he was an unofficial poet laureate at a time of little competition from the official one, Alfred Austin. While he dabbled in various genres, including poetry, the short story, the novel, and biography, it was the meditative essay, written from the standpoint of a liberal and somewhat sentimental Christian, that he made most distinctively, and lucratively, his own. He had a wide following throughout the English-speaking world, maintained a daunting correspondence, and for the last twenty-eight years of his life kept a diary that amounted at his death to 180 volumes comprising over four million words. He published more than seventy books, most of which have disappeared into an obscurity that...