Spent in the Service : a Menwir of the Very
Rev. Achilles Daunt, D.D., Dean of Cork. By the Rev. Frederick R. Wynne, M.A. (Hodder and Stoughton.)—Dr. Daunt was so remarkable, in fact scr admirable a man, that we have no hesitation in saying that this memoir is worth reading. But we have as little hesitation in adding that it owes nothing to the biographer. Never was one who less un- derstood the duty of effacing himself. So far from doing this, he obtrudes his fine-writing and spurious eloquence where these are most unwelcome. In his preface, to give but one instance, not con- tent with saying that he had been asked to undertake the work by the Dean's widow, and that such requests cannot be refused, he must add an ornament of his own,—" Sorrow has its enthronement." Happily, it would be impossible to obscure the beauty of such a char- acter as Dr. Daunt's. It answers, in a striking way, to the noble countenance which meets our eyes on the frontispiece,—a coun- tenance expressive at once of genius and of a singularly loving nature. Of his intellectual work only a few fragments remain, but his life, short as it was—he died in his forty-sixth year—gave abundant proof of a temper truly saintly in its purity and unselfishness.
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