1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dalgairns, John Dobree

DALGAIRNS, JOHN DOBREE (1818–1876), English Roman Catholic priest, was born in Guernsey on the 21st of October 1818. About the age of seventeen he entered Exeter College, Oxford, and soon after taking his degree he contributed a letter to Louis Veuillot’s ultramontane organ L’Univers, on “Anglican Church Parties,” which gave him considerable repute. Together with Mark Pattison and others, he translated the Catena aurea of St Thomas Aquinas, a commentary on the Gospels, taken from the works of the Fathers. He was a contributor to Newman’s Lives of the English Saints, for which he wrote the beautiful studies on the Cistercian Saints. The Life of St Stephen Harding has been translated into several languages. Dalgairns became a Roman Catholic in 1845, and was ordained priest in the following year. He joined his friend John Henry Newman in Rome, and, together with him, entered the Congregation of the Oratory. On his return to England in 1848, he was attached to the London Oratory, where he laboured successfully as a priest, with the exception of three years spent in Birmingham. Dalgairns was a prominent member of the well-known “Metaphysical Society.” He died at Burgess Hill, near Brighton, on the 6th of April 1876. During the Catholic period of his life, Dalgairns wrote The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with an Introduction on the History of Jansenism (London 1853); The German Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1858); The Holy Communion, its Philosophy, Theology and Practice (Dublin, 1861).

A list of his contributions on religious and philosophical subjects, to the reviews and periodicals, is given in J. Gillow’s Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics, vol. ii.