[14] At different times he held the curacy of the parishes of Forest Row, Frant and Pulborough in Sussex and Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

[24] The play, written in iambic pentameter, describes an episode from the life of Attila, King of the Huns, as he prepares to lay siege to Constantinople.

The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland attributed the book to Richard McDonald Caunter shortly after its publication.

[25] However, at least several of the poems had appeared in various magazines and annuals, in versions differing to a greater or lesser extent from those in the book, as being from the hand of the clergyman and writer John Hobart Caunter, Richard's brother.

[31][32] 'The Rescue' is stated in Attila to have been inspired by a picture, 'The Death of the Dove', by Thomas Stewardson, which Hobart had earlier written a poem about.

[35] In reviewing the volume, The Metropolitan wrote: "There is a want of force to aid lofty flights and passionate outbreakings visible throughout; and yet, in the gentle and descriptive, there is beauty and pure poetry.

"[37] The Monthly Review stated: "we do not think the powers of the poet before us adequate to the very serious demands which the concoction of a tragic drama, out of the incidents of Attila's life, prefers.

[38] The Morning Post lamented that the author appeared not to have intended the play for production on the stage, and wrote: "In the conduct of the story the interest of the reader is constantly sustained, and the character of Cerca is especially powerful in exciting the sympathy of some of the best feelings in our nature.

"[39] Old England similarly rued the author's evident lack of hope that the work would be acted on the stage, and went on to write: "We do not think he has been happy in the choice of his subject; for although the springs of human feeling and action may remain eternally the same, yet they are so refined and modified by the influence of civilization, that the heart so softened will no longer instinctively sympathise with the rude impulses of savage life.

[...] Appended to the tragedy are some very pleasing poems of a miscellaneous kind, many of them proving that the author of Attila shines in lyric amatory verse, and that the pathetic is his forte.

The days of steam-engines and spinning-jennies are come: there is a windmill for the manufacture of tapes and bobbins on Parnassus; and Helicon drives machinery which makes calico at three halfpence a yard.

Their eldest son, Richard Hanley Caunter (1841-1922), was Keeper in the Printed Books Department at the British Museum and an expert in Spanish.