Life
1671-?1729; b. Ireland, ed., TCD; ord.; supported Whigs and attacked Swift on appt. to St. Patrick’s; appt. dean of Killala, 1718; dean of Clogher, 1724, resigning in 1727; A Christmas Invitation to the Lord Carteret (Dublin 1725); earned place in Pope’s Dunciad for attacks on Swift and Pope in Gulliverniana (1728); also issued The Metamorphosis, a poem (1728); Poems on Several Occasions (1730); a poem appears in Matthew Concanen’s collection; died, travelled to India in Feb. 1728 [var. 1729 FDA]. PI FDA
References
D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); quotes offending lines from Gulliverniana ‘Who reads Pope’s verses, or Dean Gully’s prose,/Must a strong stomach have, or else no nose’; cites also ‘A Letter from a Friend to Miss Smedley’ (1730), addressed to his daughter.
Notes
Smedley and Swift called ‘inseparable complements of one another’ by Mark R. Blackwell, in Patrick Kelly ed., Locating Swift (Dublin: Four Courts 1998), 208pp.
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