The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 16. Mahony
Francis Sylvester Mahony, better known as Father Prout, was born in Cork in 1804. Ordained as a Jesuit, he became a master at Clongowes college and, when there, began to write for English magazines and journals—Fraser’s Magazine, where the first of the celebrated Reliques in prose and verse appeared with the afterwards well-known signature “Father Prout P.P. of Watergrasshill, Co. Cork”; The Daily News, to which he contributed a series of letters, as Roman correspondent, under the designation “Don Jeremy Savonarola”; Bentley’s Miscellany and The Cornhill. Afterwards, he became Paris correspondent of The Globe, of which he was part proprietor. He died in Paris in 1866. A learned and witty essayist and a brilliant versifier in English and Latin, he had the audacity to turn some of Moore’s Irish Melodies into Latin verse and then claim that his translations were the originals. He is now, however, best known by The Bells of Shandon and a droll imitation of an Irish hedge-school ballad, entitled The Sabine Farmer’s Serenade.