Poor Kenney, who wrote so many merry comedies and farces, and made so many thousands of playgoers laugh till their sides ached, was a sickly, sallow-looking man, much given to despondency and hypochondriasis. No wonder! for he was in poverty, and getting on in years. At a Brighton dinner-party given by Horace Smith, at which were present Charles Mathews, senior, three or four literary men, and three or four ladies, who had no pretension to the bas bleu, Kenney suddenly gave way to a violent fit of coughing, started up from table, walked across the room, coughing all the time, and getting almost black in the face. At last, with a violent effort, he ejected from his throat a big bit of cork, which he had not noticed in his glass, and which he had swallowed with his last gulp of wine. “Ah!” said Horace, “that was not the road for Cork, but it was the way to Kill Kenney!” I really believe that if the dramatist had been choked outright, Smith would have had his pun. He was not a cynical or unfeeling man; very far from that, but the opportunity of punning was a temptation he could never resist.
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The worst of him was that he punned with a serious face. Though rather a good-looking man, there was no play or mobility on his features; his face and eyes did not “pun” with him. Rose used to say that he would just as soon hear his puns from an automaton, or through the open cherry lips of a perruquier’s wax bust, as from Horace.
For some considerable time Kemp Town, Brighton, promised to be an unprofitable speculation to its founder and proprietor. Though the situation was good and the houses of a superior order, they did not let. I can remember when there were only one or two occupied by families. But the gas was laid on, and the whole place brilliantly lighted at night. Somebody said to Smith that he was afraid Kemp Town was not thriving. “How can you expect it to thrive, when it’s all lights, and no liver?” punned Horace.
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