Oliphant Smeaton, the son of the Rev. George Smeaton, a professor in the Free Church of Scotland, was editor of the Queensland journal the Daily Northern Argus at various times. He contributed articles to English journals from Australia in the 1890s, and wrote a series of biographies published in the Famous Scots Series, including Allan Ramsay (1896), Tobias Smollett (1897), William Dunbar (1898), Thomas Guthrie (1900) and James Morrison (date unknown). He also wrote The Medici and the Italian Renaissance (1901), Edinburgh and Its Story (1904), The Life and Works of William Shakespeare (1911), Longfellow and His Poetry (1913) and The Scott Country : A Tour Round the Lowlands Districts, described in the Works of Sir Walter Scott (1920). He edited a number of works, including Ballads, Ancient and Modern (1912), the 1910 edition of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (as well as Gibbon's autobiography, 1911), and supplied introductions for various other works, including Francis Bacon's Essays (1906), Shakespeare's Comedies (1906), English Satires (1907) and The Guls Hornibrook (1928).
