JENYNS, SOAME (1704-1787)

This article appears in Volume V15, Page 321 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: JEE-JUN

JENYNS, SOAME (1704-1787) , English author, was born in London on the 1st of January 1704, and was educated at St John's College,

Cambridge

. In 1742 he was chosen M.P. for Cambridgeshire, in which his property lay, and he afterwards sat for the borough of Dunwich and the town of

Cambridge

. From 1755 to 1780 he was one of the commissioners of the board of

trade

. He died on the 18th of December 1787.
For the measure of literary repute which he enjoyed during his life Jenyns was indebted as much to his wealth and social

standing

STANDING

as to his accomplishments and talents, though both were considerable. His poetical works, the Art of Dancing (1727) and Miscellanies (1770), contain many passages graceful and lively though occasionally verging on

licence

LICENCE (through the French from Lat. licentia, licere, to be lawful)

. The first of his

prose

PROSE

works was his Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1756). This essay was severely criticized on its

appearance

APPEARANCE (from Lat. apparere, to appear)

, especially by Samuel Johnson in the Literary Magazine. John-son, in a slashing reviewthe best

paper

PAPER
PAPER (Fr. papier, from Lat. papyrus)

of the kind he ever wrotecondemned the book as a slight and shallow attempt to solve one of the most difficult of moral problems. Jenyns, a gentle and amiable man in the main, was extremely irritated by his failure. He put forth a second edition of his

work

WORK

, prefaced by a vindication, and tried to take vengeance on Johnson after his death by a sarcastic epitaph.' In 1776 Jenyns published his View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion. Though at one period of his life he had affected a kind of deistic scepticism, he had now returned to orthodoxy, and there seems no reason to doubt his sincerity, questioned at the time, in defending Christianity on the ground of its total variance with the principles of human reason. The

work

WORK

was deservedly praised in its day for its literary merits, but is so plainly the production of an

amateur

AMATEUR (Lat. amator, lover)

in theology that as a scientific treatise it is valueless.
A collected edition of the works of Jenyns appeared in 1790, with a

biography

BIOGRAPHY (from the Gr. (3ios, life, and yp&4 , writing)

by Charles Nalson Cole. There are several references to him in Boswell's Johnson.

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