SOURCE: Bennett, Arnold. “Mr. A. C. Benson.” In Books and Persons: Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911, pp. 239-41. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1917.

In the following essay, Bennett discusses his reaction to The Thread of Gold.

I am indebted to Mr. Murray for sending what is to me a new manifestation of the entirely precious activity of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson. Mr. Benson, in The Thread of Gold, ministers to all that is highest and most sacred in the Mudie temperament. It is not a new book; only I have been getting behindhand. It was first printed in 1905, and it seems to have been on and off the printing-presses ever since, and now Mr. Murray has issued it, very neatly, at a shilling net, so that people who have never even been inside Mudie's may obtain it. I have read the book with intense joy...