Francis Sylvester Mahony

Francis Sylvester Mahony , pseud. Father Prout , 1804-66, Irish humorist. He was dismissed from the Jesuit order in 1830 for a minor offense. In 1832 he became a parish priest but lived most of his life as a man of letters. His witty essays and poems—all purported to be the work of a priest named Father Prout—contributed to Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals, were collected as The Reliques of Father Prout (1836) and The Final Reliques of Father Prout (1875). His best-known work is the poem "The Bells of Shandon."

Mahony, Francis Sylvester (1804–66), best known by his pseudonym Father Prout, a Jesuit priest who left the order for a career as a journalist and poet. He contributed many lively papers and poems to Fraser's Magazine (later collected as The Reliques of Father Prout, 1836) and Bentley's Miscellany. These included translations from Horace, Béranger, Hugo, etc., and, interspersed amongst them, mystifications in the form of invented ‘originals’ in French, Latin, and Greek for well known poems by T. Moore, C. Wolfe, and others.