to the throne. According to the English chroniclers, Kenneth paid homage to King Edgar for the cession of Lothian, but these statements are probably due to the controversy as to the position of Scotland. The mormaers, or chiefs, of Kenneth were engaged throughout his reign in a contest with Sigurd the Norwegian, earl of Orkney, for the possession of Caithness and the northern district of Scotland as far south as the Spey. In this struggle the Scots attained no permanent success. In 995 Kenneth, whose strength like that of the other kings of his branch of the house of Kenneth MacAlpin lay chiefly north of the Tay, was slain treacherously by his own subjects, according to the later chroniclers at Fettercairn in the Mearns through an intrigue of Einvela, daughter of the earl of Angus. He was buried at Iona.
See Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, ed. W. F. Skene (Edinburgh, 1867), and W. F. Skene, Celtic Scotland (Edinburgh, 1876).
KENNETT, WHITE (1660–1728), English bishop and antiquary, was born at Dover in August 1660. He was educated at Westminster school and at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, where, while an undergraduate, he published several translations of Latin works, including Erasmus In Praise of Folly. In 1685 he became vicar of Ambrosden, Oxfordshire. A few years afterwards he returned to Oxford as tutor and vice-principal of St Edmund’s Hall, where he gave considerable impetus to the study of antiquities. George Hickes gave him lessons in Old English. In 1695 he published Parochial Antiquities. In 1700 he became rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, London, and in 1701 archdeacon of Huntingdon. For a eulogistic sermon on the first duke of Devonshire he was in 1707 recommended to the deanery of Peterborough. He afterwards joined the Low Church party, strenuously opposed the Sacheverel movement, and in the Bangorian controversy supported with great zeal and considerable bitterness the side of Bishop Hoadly. His intimacy with Charles Trimnell, bishop of Norwich, who was high in favour with the king, secured for him in 1718 the bishopric of Peterborough. He died at Westminster in December 1728.
Kennett published in 1698 an edition of Sir Henry Spelman’s History of Sacrilege, and he was the author of fifty-seven printed works, chiefly tracts and sermons. He wrote the third volume (Charles I.–Anne) of the composite Compleat History of England (1706), and a more detailed and valuable Register and Chronicle of the Restoration. He was much interested in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
The Life of Bishop White Kennett, by the Rev. William Newton (anonymous), appeared in 1730. See also Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, and I. Disraeli’s Calamities of Authors.
KENNEY, JAMES (1780–1849), English dramatist, was the son of James Kenney, one of the founders of Boodles’ Club in London. His first play, a farce called Raising the Wind (1803), was a success owing to the popularity of the character of “Jeremy Diddler.” Kenney produced more than forty dramas and operas between 1803 and 1845, and many of his pieces, in which Mrs Siddons, Madame Vestris, Foote, Lewis, Liston and other leading players appeared from time to time, enjoyed a considerable vogue. His most popular play was Sweethearts and Wives, produced at the Haymarket theatre in 1823, and several times afterwards revived; and among the most successful of his other works were: False Alarms (1807), a comic opera with music by Braham; Love, Law and Physic (1812); Spring and Autumn (1827); The Illustrious Stranger, or Married and Buried (1827); Masaniello (1829); The Sicilian Vespers, a tragedy (1840). Kenney, who numbered Charles Lamb and Samuel Rogers among his friends, died in London on the 25th of July 1849. He married the widow of the dramatist Thomas Holcroft, by whom he had two sons and two daughters.
His second son, Charles Lamb Kenney (1823–1881), made a name as a journalist, dramatist and miscellaneous writer. Commencing life as a clerk in the General Post Office in London, he joined the staff of The Times, to which paper he contributed dramatic criticism. In 1856, having been called to the bar, he became secretary to Ferdinand de Lesseps, and in 1857 he published The Gates of the East in support of the projected construction of the Suez Canal. Kenney wrote the words for a number of light operas, and was the author of several popular songs, the best known of which were “Soft and Low” (1865) and “The Vagabond” (1871). He also published a Memoir of M. W. Balfe (1875), and translated the Correspondence of Balzac. He included Thackeray and Dickens among his friends in a literary coterie in which he enjoyed the reputation of a wit and an accomplished writer of vers de société. He died in London on the 25th of August 1881.
See John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 1660–1830, vols. vii. and viii. (10 vols., London, 1832); P. W. Clayden, Rogers and his Contemporaries (2 vols., London, 1889); Dict. National Biog.
KENNGOTT, GUSTAV ADOLPH (1818–1897), German mineralogist, was born at Breslau on the 6th of January 1818. After being employed in the Hofmineralien Cabinet at Vienna, he became professor of mineralogy in the university of Zürich. He was distinguished for his researches on mineralogy, crystallography and petrology. He died at Lugano, on the 7th of March 1897.
Publications.—Lehrbuch der reinen Krystallographie (1846); Lehrbuch der Mineralogie (1852 and 1857; 5th ed., 1880); Übersicht der Resultate mineralogischer Forschungen in den Jahren 1844–1865 (7 vols., 1852–1868); Die Minerale der Schweiz (1866); Elemente der Petrographie (1868).
KENNICOTT, BENJAMIN (1718–1783), English divine and Hebrew scholar, was born at Totnes, Devonshire, on the 4th of April 1718. He succeeded his father as master of a charity school, but by the liberality of friends he was enabled to go to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1744, where he distinguished himself in Hebrew and divinity. While an undergraduate he published two dissertations, On the Tree of Life in Paradise, with some Observations on the Fall of Man, and On the Oblations of Cain and Abel (2nd ed., 1747), which procured him the honour of a bachelor’s degree before the statutory time. In 1747 he was elected fellow of Exeter College, and in 1750 he took his degree of M.A. In 1764 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1767 keeper of the Radcliffe Library. He was also canon of Christ Church (1770) and rector of Culham (1753), in Oxfordshire, and was subsequently presented to the living of Menheniot, Cornwall, which he was unable to visit and resigned two years before his death. He died at Oxford, on the 18th of September 1783.
His chief work is the Vetus Testamentum hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (2 vols. fol., Oxford, 1776–1780). Before this appeared he had written two dissertations entitled The State of the Printed Hebrew Text of the Old Testament considered, published respectively in 1753 and 1759, which were designed to combat the then current ideas as to the “absolute integrity” of the received Hebrew text. The first contains “a comparison of 1 Chron. xi. with 2 Sam. v. and xxiii. and observations on seventy MSS., with an extract of mistakes and various readings”; the second defends the claims of the Samaritan Pentateuch, assails the correctness of the printed copies of the Chaldee paraphrase, gives an account of Hebrew MSS. of the Bible known to be extant, and catalogues one hundred MSS. preserved in the British Museum and in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1760 he issued his proposals for collating all Hebrew MSS. of date prior to the invention of printing. Subscriptions to the amount of nearly £10,000 were obtained, and many learned men addressed themselves to the work of collation, Bruns of Helmstadt making himself specially useful as regarded MSS. in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Between 1760 and 1769 ten “annual accounts” of the progress of the work were given; in its course 615 Hebrew MSS. and 52 printed editions of the Bible were either wholly or partially collated, and use was also made (but often very perfunctorily) of the quotations in the Talmud. The materials thus collected, when properly arranged and made ready for the press, extended to 30 vols. fol. The text finally followed in printing was that of Van der Hooght—unpointed however, the points having been disregarded in collation—and the various readings were printed at the foot of the page. The Samaritan Pentateuch stands alongside the Hebrew in parallel columns. The Dissertatio generalis, appended to the second volume, contains an account of the MSS. and other authorities collated, and also a review of the Hebrew text, divided into periods, and beginning with the formation of the Hebrew canon after the return of the Jews from the exile. Kennicott’s great work was in one sense a failure. It yielded no materials of value for the emendation of the received text, and by disregarding the vowel points overlooked the one thing in which some result (grammatical if not critical) might have been derived from collation of Massoretic MSS. But the negative result of the publication and of the Variæ
