Born into a very poor family who subsisted on farming and spinning wool,  Quick began to  earn money from selling popular journals to which he also submitted his self – described ‘rugged verses for the countryside’.

Quick would write about local crimes and calamities and typically ended each poem with a religious exhortation but his poetry also described the potato famine. 

He also enjoyed acrostic poems where the first letter of each line corresponded to the person as shown (right) with the poem ‘Handbill’ for John Verrant of St. Hilary.

His most renowned publications though were his ‘Life and Progress in eighty-nine verses’,  ‘Verses on the new Queen Victoria’ and ‘On the Glorious Coronation of Queen Victoria’.