As an essayist Compton Mackenzie cultivated a tradition going back to Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon, of flights of introspective and descriptive writing, often autobiographical in focus, with an application to principled conduct or at least a resolute attitude toward life and art. He digested experience in the manner of Sir William Temple and could view the metropolitan scene with detachment like the "Mr. Spectator" created by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, but was also accustomed to observing nature in the fashion of Gilbert White of Selborne. Charles Lamb's whimsical humor was not entirely foreign to Mackenzie; nor is the flow of talk in his essays so very far removed from that of William Hazlitt. Walter Pater was a star in Mackenzie's intellectual firmament, but Mackenzie learned to view aestheticism through the ironic eyes of Max Beerbohm. At the same time, the example of Robert Louis Stevenson's...