A critic of equal ability, impudence, and literary ferocity, was for a long time—first in the Monthly and subsequently in the London Review—the terror of the new scribes, and the object of disgust to the old authors, of his own day. Goldsmith, Akenside, Johnson, Colman, Boswell, Garrick, and a host of others, were in turn made to suffer for having gained that popularity or notoriety which the public denied to him. We have already had something to say of this “Literary Ishmaelite” in our lives of Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson, and have little to add in this place. His productions—consisting of poems, poetical epistles, philosophical and philological speculations, comedies, letters, &c., pub. from 1751 to 1773—are now forgotten, save in connexion with the better men whom he attacked; nor would the world be much benefited by a revival of this lost knowledge. But those who desire to explore further may consult the Monthly Review (Kenrick’s own child) the London Review; Gent. Mag.; Chalmers’s Biog. Dict.; Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” and other literary records of the day, and the “Encyc. Brit.” His most ambitious publication was “A New Dictionary of the English Language: to which is prefixed a Rhetorical Grammar,” Lon., 1773, 4to. “The Rhetorical Grammar” was also pub. separately in 1784, 8vo.
| Dreaming of genius which he never had, | |
| Half wit, half fool, half critic, and half mad; | |
| Seizing like Shirley on the poet’s lyre, | |
| With all the rage, but not one spark of fire; | |
| Eager for slaughter and resolved to tear | |
| From others’ brows that wreath he must not wear, | |
| Next Kenrick came; all furious and replete | |
| With brandy, malice, pertness, and conceit. | |
| Unskill’d in classic lore, through envy blind | |
| To all that’s beauteous, learned, or refined; | |
| For faults alone behold the savage prowl, | |
| With Reason’s offal glut his ravening soul; | |
| Pleas’d with his prey, its inmost blood he drinks, | |
| And mumbles, paws, and turns it—till it stinks. |
He was brought up as a scale-maker, or in some such employment, but early became a hack writer. He had a strong love of notoriety, a jealous and perverse temper, and was often drunk and violent. He became the enemy of every decent and successful person, and so notorious as a libeller that few condescended to answer him. His vanity led him to fancy himself equal to any task with serious study…. In his later years Kenrick seldom wrote without a bottle of brandy at his elbow. Though a superlative scoundrel, he was clever, and especially proud of the rapidity of his writing, even his more serious works.
General
Though he certainly was not without considerable merit, he wrote with so little regard to decency and principles, and decorum, and in so hasty a manner, that his reputation was neither extensive nor lasting. I remember one evening, when some of his works were mentioned, Dr. Goldsmith said, he had never heard of them; upon which Dr. Johnson observed, “Sir, he is one of the many who have made themselves publick, without making themselves known.”
The turn of his criticism, the airiness or the asperity of his sarcasm, the arrogance with which he treated some of our great authors, would prove very amusing, and serve to display a certain talent of criticism…. He was a man of talents, who ran a race with the press; could criticise all the genius of the age faster than it could be produced; could make his own malignity look like wit, and turn the wit of others into absurdity by placing it topsy-turvy.
It may be well, however, in passing, to bestow our mite of notoriety upon the miscreant who launched the slander. [On Goldsmith] He deserves it for a long course of dastardly and venomous attacks, not merely upon Goldsmith, but upon most of the successful authors of the day.
