Among the deaths of last week our readers will have seen the name of the Rev. Francis Storr, Vicar of Brenchley, Kent. The news reached us only in time to record the bare fact, but we cannot pass over in silence a life, uneventful indeed, but none the less noteworthy. Mr. Storr was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of a remarkable band of men, linked together by common views and doctrines, but still more closely united by the apostolic zeal and devotedness to Christ’s service which animated one and all. He was the brother-in-law and intimate ally of Dean Champneys and Bishop Utterton, and the life-long friend of the Bishop of Norwich and the Bishop of Liverpool. Born in 1808, he graduated at Oxford in 1833 (the year of the first appearance of _Tracts for the Times_), being awarded an honorary Fourth Class. With the Tractarian movement he felt no sympathy, and, though on terms of friendship with some of the leaders of that movement, from the very first he threw in his lot with the Evangelical party, never swerving in his allegiance to the end, though ripening years taught him more and more to see good in everything and to attach less importance to party distinctions. In the same year he was ordained by the Bishop of Chichester to the curacy of Up-Waltham, and two years after he took the curacy of Beckenham, Kent. Here he married his first wife, Caroline, daughter of Colonel Holland of Langley Farm, Beckenham, a true and constant helpmate during the twenty years that she was spared to share his labours. In 1837 he was presented to the living of Otley, in Suffolk, and in this small but neglected parish his energies found for a time full scope. When he came, there was no parsonage (no previous Rector had ever lived in the parish), the church was dilapidated, and the churchyard a neglected waste. A parsonage was built, the church restored, and the churchyard reclaimed. But the spiritual change wrought by his means in the parish was even more striking. The voice of one crying, not in a dissenting chapel, but from a Church of England pulpit, “Repent ye,” and appealing with all the fervour and some of the eloquence of a Whitfield, to the individual conscience was a strange sound in that sleepy hollow. Those who had never before set foot in a church came, first from curiosity, then from genuine interest, and then carried the good news to their neighbours, so that the little church could sometimes not contain the hearers who came from twenty parishes round. His sermons were wholly extempore; he never took a note with him into the pulpit. In the most literal sense of the words, “he preached unto them the Scriptures,” for having studied the text of the Bible as few clergymen are now wont in these days of multiplied expositions and commentaries, and being gifted with a strong memory, he would pour forth verse after verse in support of any point he was urging, giving in each case the exact reference.