Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/420

 became governor and commander-in-chief of Hong Kong. His tenure of this office determined in 1877, when he was made governor of Queensland. He left Australia for England in 1883, but died during the voyage off Aden, in the Red Sea, 13 June 1883.

Kennedy married in 1839 Georgina Mildred, daughter of Joseph Macartney of St. Helen's, co. Dublin. She died 3 Oct. 1874, leaving one son, Arthur Herbert William, who entered the army, and two daughters.

[Times Register of Events, 1883, Obituary, p. xliii; Men of the Reign, p. 495; Heaton's Australian Dictionary of Dates, p. 105; Foster's Peerage, p. 722; Annual Register, 1883, p. 152.] 

KENNEDY, BENJAMIN HALL, D.D. (1804–1889), head-master of Shrewsbury School, regius professor of Greek at Cambridge, and canon of Ely, born at Summer Hill, near Birmingham, in 1804, was eldest son of Rann Kennedy [q. v.] From 1814 to 1818 he was educated in his father's house and at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and throughout his youth owed much to the encouragement of his father's friends, Dr. John Johnstone [q. v.] and Dr. Parr [q. v.], the latter especially taking a keen interest in him. The example of his father early imbued him with a love of learning and passionate admiration for poetry, and he read widely in his father's large library. When a child he thoroughly mastered an edition of ‘The British Theatre’ in thirty volumes, and a love of dramatic literature never left him. In spite, however, of his discursive reading, he worked hard at classics, and when, in January 1819, he went to Shrewsbury School, the composition which he wrote, consisting, as the fashion then was, entirely of original Latin composition in verse and prose, exhibits astonishing command of Latin and power of invention. Samuel Butler (1774–1839) [q. v.] was the head-master of Shrewsbury, and had made it one of the leading schools of the country. Under him young Kennedy rapidly developed. In a year he became second boy, and in a year and a half, when he was not sixteen, head boy, a position which he held until he left in 1823. Among his schoolfellows were Charles (Autobiography, i. 30 seq.) and Erasmus Darwin. While still at school, by Butler's advice, he sent in a copy of iambics for the Porson prize, and a Latin ode for Sir W. Browne's medal at Cambridge; in both cases the examiners selected his composition for the prize, and, although he was not eligible for the Browne medal, he received the Porson, and the regulations were in consequence altered, so that he is the only schoolboy who ever won it.

In 1823 Kennedy went to St. John's College, Cambridge. Professor J. E. B. Mayor (Classical Review, May 1889) says that the list of what he had then read ‘sounds like the record of a Scaliger.’ In January 1824, when only in his second term, he won the Pitt university scholarship. During the examination Dean Law set Isaiah ch. xiv. 6–17 for Greek iambics, and Kennedy's translation (see Between Whiles) was so good that the Greek professor, Dobree, had it printed and circulated. His other university distinctions were the Porson prize for the second time in 1824, and for the third in 1826; the prizes for the Greek ode in 1824, for the Latin ode in 1824, and for the epigrams in 1825, and the members' prize in 1828. He graduated B.A. in 1827, being a senior optime in the mathematical tripos, and senior classic and first chancellor's medallist. Throughout his undergraduate career he was as notable for his wit and his social qualities as for his scholarship. The first Lord Lytton, who for fifty years remained his close friend (see dedication of translation of The Birds), has recorded (Life, i. 232) the impression produced by ‘an ardent, enthusiastic youth from Shrewsbury, a young giant in learning, who carried away the prize from Praed.’ He took frequent part in the Union debates, then held in the back room of the Red Lion in Petty Cury, and became president in 1825. In 1824 he was also elected a member of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as ‘the Apostles,’ where he formed an intimacy with Frederick Denison Maurice [q. v.] and John Sterling [q. v.], and in the same year became an original member of the Athenæum, at the invitation of Richard Heber. Among his other friends and acquaintances in what Lord Lytton calls ‘that brilliant undergraduate world’ (Life of his father, i. 243, and see pp. 243–7) were W. M. Praed, Alexander Cockburn, Charles Wordsworth, Charles Buller, and William Selwyn (see dedication Between Whiles, 1st edit.)

In 1827 Kennedy went to Shrewsbury as an assistant-master, but, on being elected fellow of St. John's in 1828, returned to Cambridge to take pupils. Among them were R. Shilleto, Charles Merivale (afterwards dean of Ely), Henry Philpott (afterwards bishop of Worcester), and William Cavendish (afterwards seventh duke of Devonshire). He was ordained deacon in 1829 and priest in 1830, and in the latter year accepted a mastership under Dr. Longley at Harrow, where he had the Grove House. In March 1831 he married Janet, daughter of Thomas Caird, esq., of Paignton, Devonshire. At Harrow (see Recollections of Harrow, by H. T. Torre, 1890) discipline was at the time extremely lax, and