Sheridan was an ordained priest and a strong classicist who taught school in Dublin--he received his first benefice at age 38 and never acquired much patronage. He was a close friend of Swift's until late in life, and his oeuvre has a poor-man's-Swift quality to it: lots of broadside squibs and coterie verse published as broadsides; puns and jocular verse; and an essentially secular albeit moralizing poetic persona (though there is one published sermon). Unclear w/o reading them what social/economic work these published poems were supposed to do.