Ebook The Life of Monsignor, Robert Hugh Benson

At Cambridge Rectory
June 1905 - July 1908

Not on the valugar mass
Called "work" must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price ...
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed, in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount. R. Browning.

In June Father Benson migrated therefore to the Catholic Rectory, where he found himself under the kindly and most congenial presidency of Monsignor Scott.

"It is going," he characteristically writes to Mrs. Benson on June 3rd, 1905, "to be immensely happy here. I am assured that I must do exactly what I like in everything."

In treating of these three years, I shall still endeavour to allow, upon the whole, general views and judgments to emerge for each reader out of accumulated quotations from contemporary letters, feeling sure that, despite a certain scrappiness, or possible repetitions, or even an air of pedantry, readers will prefer to get as near as possible to Father Benson's own mind and mood.