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出典:『Wikipedia』 (2010/09/27 08:08 UTC 版)

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Bennet Allen (fl. 1761–1782) was an English miscellaneous writer. He was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, where he took the degree of B.A. 16 November 1757, and that of M.A. 12 July 1760. He subsequently appears to have taken holy orders, for which his writings prove him to have been singularly unfitted, and to have settled in London. Patronised by leaders of society of doubtful reputation, he apparently obtained a livelihood for some time by pandering in the press to the fashionable vices of the age. His first work, a ‘Poem inscribed to his Britannic Majesty,’ published in 1761, shortly after the accession of George III of England, is unobjectionable; but in 1768 he is generally credited with aiding the son of the Marquis of Granby to defend Lord Baltimore, who was awaiting his trial in Newgate on a charge of rape, by the publication of an anonymous pamphlet entitled ‘Modern Chastity; or the Agreeable Rape, a poem by a young gentleman of sixteen in vindication of the Right Hon. Lord B——e.’ The production chiefly consists of a coarse attack on the Methodist sect, to which the prosecutrix in the case against Lord Baltimore belonged. It is attributed to Allen on the fairly certain ground of a contemporary manuscript note in the copy at the British Museum, stating it to be ‘undoubtedly by the well-known Rev. Bennet Allen.’ Horace Walpole is believed to refer to this work and to another on a kindred topic, of which Allen is also assumed to be the author, in a letter to the Countess of Ossory, dated 5 January 1774. ‘The present Lord Granby (who had succeeded to the title in 1770),’ he writes, ‘is an author, and has written a poem on “Charity” (i.e. a probable misreading for ‘Chastity’), and in prose a “Modest Apology for Adultery.” . . . They say his lordship writes in concert with a very clever young man, whose name I have forgotten.’ A shilling pamphlet, entitled ‘A Modest Apology for the prevailing Practice of Adultery,’ was announced for publication in August 1773 in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ (p. 398), but nothing further is known of it, and it may possibly have been suppressed.