Baillie (Bailie), James Kennedy (1793?–1864), classicist and protestant clergyman, was the son of the Rev. Nicholas Ward Kennedy, a schoolmaster, and grandson of James Kennedy, a medical man in Co. Down. He entered TCD aged fourteen (1807), became a scholar (1810), graduated BA (1812), was elected to a fellowship (1817), and awarded the degree of DD (1828); in January 1818 he was elected MRIA. He was ordained minister in the established church (1817) and in 1830 moved to Stewartstown, Co. Tyrone, to become rector of Ardtrea, in which post he was to remain until his death. Considered the most erudite Hellenist at Trinity, he was the author, translator, or editor of several works, one of the earliest being Lachrymae academicae: . . . stanzas in English and Greek addressed to the memory of Princess Charlotte (1818). He published two distinct editions of Homer's Iliad, the first with Latin notes and excursus (1821–3), the second for school and college use (1833), and was the translator of Agamemnon: a tragedy translated from Eschylus into English verse (1829). He published Lectures on the philosophy of the Mosaic record of creation (1826; new ed., 1827) and Analysis of prelections on the language and literature of ancient Greece (1831).
In 1842 he travelled in Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, copying many inscriptions, which he published as Fasciculus inscriptionum Graecarum (3 vols, 1842–9). For many years he was a fellow of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland. James Kennedy Bailie or Baillie – for reasons not ascertained he assumed a new surname in 1835 – died unmarried on 18 January 1864. It was said of him by Robert Perceval Graves (1810–93) that ‘his judgment was not equal to his erudition and his language, not only in his writings but in his conversation, was famed for polysyllabic pedantry’.