[100] In one of his own publications he quotes, with great self-complacency, the following lines on himself:--
"The wits who drink water and suck sugar-candy, Impute the strong spirit of Kenrick to brandy: They are not so much out; the matter in short is, He sips _aqua-vitæ_ and spits _aqua-fortis_."
[101] Dr. Kenrick's character and career is thus summed up in the "Biographia Dramatica:"--"This author, with singular abilities, was neither happy or successful. Few persons were ever less respected by the world; still fewer have created so many enemies, or dropped into the grave so little regretted by their contemporaries. He was seldom without an enemy to attack or defend himself from." He was the son of a London citizen, and is said to have served an apprenticeship to a brass-rule maker. One of his best known literary works was a comedy called _Falstaff's Wedding_, which met with considerable success upon the stage, although its author ventured on the difficult task of adopting Shakespeare's characters, and putting new words into the mouth of the immortal Sir John and his satellites.--ED.
Vast erudition, without the tact of good sense, in a voluminous author, what a calamity! for to such a mind no subject can present itself on which he is unprepared to write, and none at the same time on which he can ever write reasonably. The name and the works of WILLIAM PRYNNE have often come under the eye of the reader; but it is even now difficult to discover his real character; for Prynne stood so completely insulated amid all parties, that he was ridiculed by his friends, and execrated by his enemies. The exuberance of his fertile pen, the strangeness and the manner of his subjects, and his pertinacity in voluminous publication, are known, and are nearly unparalleled in literary history.
Could the man himself be separated from the author, Prynne would not appear ridiculous; but the unlucky author of nearly two hundred works,[102] and who, as Wood quaintly computes, "must have written a sheet every day of his life, reckoning from the time that he came to the use of reason and the state of man," has involved his life in his authorship; the greatness of his character loses itself in his voluminous works; and whatever Prynne may have been in his own age, and remains to posterity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of an author who has strained learning into absurdity, and abused zealous industry by chimerical speculation.
