BY THE sudden death of Mgr R. H. Benson a strange career has ended. A son of the late Archbishop Benson, he followed his father's steps to Trinity College, Cambridge. Having taken his degree, he became one of Dean Vaughan's "doves", studying with him at Llandaff. On being admitted to Holy Orders he served at the Eton Mission, Hackney Wick, and, later, at Kemsing, in Kent. In 1898 he joined himself to the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield. His power as a mission preacher, at this period of his career, is borne testimony to by a writer in another column. Doubts of the Catholicity of the English Church had assailed him for some years, it appears. In 1903, he took his departure from it; in due course the Sacraments he had once for all received were repeated, and he became a priest of what his father described as the "new Italian Mission". With his later ecclesiastical career we are not concerned, but as a writer and novelist he was known to everyone. His earlier works, as a whole, are those on which his literary reputation will, we think, rest. The Light Invisible, a mystical book full of charm, is worthy of an enduring life. . . The Confessions of a Convict (sic), in which, according to the Westminster Gazette, "his apologia was embodied", is a work which we do not recognize under that exact title, but The Confessions of a Convert certainly may be numbered among his literary remains. In private life, Mgr Benson was an agreeable personage, and his death at an early age will be mourned by a host of friends.

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