Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Quick, Henry
QUICK, HENRY (1792–1857), the Cornish poet, born on 4 Dec. 1792, of humble parentage, at Zennor, where he spent his life, wrote from youth upwards rugged verses for the countryside. He increased a precarious income by the sale of popular journals, which he procured each month from Penzance. From 1830 until his death he commemorated in verse all the local calamities and crimes, usually closing each poem with a religious exhortation. Most of his lucubrations he printed as broadsides. In 1836 he wrote his ‘Life and Progress’ in eighty-nine verses. He also printed ‘A new Copy, &c., on the Glorious Coronation of Queen Victoria’ (1838); ‘A new Copy of Verses on the Scarcity of the Present Season and Dreadful Famine in Ireland’ (1848); and similar trifles both in verse and prose.
An engraving represents Quick in curious costume, with a printed sheet in his hand and a basket under his arm (Millett, Penzance Past and Present, p. 36). He died at Mill Hill Down, Zennor, on 9 Oct. 1857.
[Cornish Telegraph, 21 Oct. 1857; Boase and Courtney's Bibl. Cornub. Suppl., where is a full list of his works.]