31 MAY 1879, Page 23

Spent in the Service: a Memoir of the Very Rev.

Achilles Daunt, D.D., Dean of Cork. By the Rev. F. R. Wynne, MA. (Hodder and Stoughton.)—This book depicts with sympathetic vividness a character of unusual beauty and charm. Dr. Daunt's life was not eventful, its incidents consisted only in changes of the scene of labours whose character and whose success were always the same, and whose in- tensity cut short his life. As Rector of Rincurran, as Incumbent of St. Matthiaa's at Dublin, as Dean of Cork, his days were spent in a devotion to the spiritual welfare of his flock, so single-hearted and unfailing, that he seems hardly to have known any other motive or desire. Possessing in his manner all the warmth and brightness of his Irish race, and gifted with that " pente naturelle vers le cceur d'autrui " to which Montalembert ascribes the potency of Lacordaire, he seems to have thrown all his personal gifts unreservedly into the service of his Master. Readers of religious biography will seldom meet with a character which the most unhesitating convictions left so free from dogmatic harshness, and to which all the fame of a popular preacher was so powerless to add one touch of self-conscious- ness or vanity. His early death has deprived the Protestant Church of Ireland of a leader, and more than this, of a pacificator, whom she will find it hard to replace.