Excerpt from Sermons by the Late Rev. Walter Blake Kirwan, Dean of Killala: With a Sketch of His Life This celebrated preacher was descended from an ancient and respectable Roman Catholic family, and born in Galway about the year 17541. He was sent in early youth to the college of English Jesuits at St. Omers, in whose classic shades, as he often declared, he imbibed the noble ambition of benefiting mankind. At the age of seventeen he embarked for the Danish island of St. Croix, in the West Indies, under the protection of his father's cousin-german, who had large possessions there; but after enduring for six years a climate pernicious to his delicate constitution, and spectacles of oppression and cruelty shocking to his feelings, he returned to Europe 111 disgust. By the advice of his maternal uncle, then titular primate of Ireland, he repaired to the University of Louvain, where he received priest's orders, and was soon after honoured with the chair of natural and moral philosophy. But 111 1778 he was called from the sequestered pursuits of science to the cure of souls, as chaplain to the Neapolitan ambassador at the British court. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.