For the measure of literary repute which he enjoyed during his life Jenyns was indebted as much to his wealth and social 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. The first of his prose works was his Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Eml, 1756. This essay was severely criticized on its appearance, especially by Dr Johnson in the Literary Magazine. Johnson in this critique—the very best paper of the kind he ever wrote—condemned the book strongly as a slight and shallow attempt to solve one of the most difficult of moral problems. Jenyns, a gentle and amiable man in the mam, was extremely irritated by his failure. He put forth a second edition of his work with a vindication prefixed, 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 the orthodox creed of his youth, 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 was deservedly praised in its day for its literary merits, but is so plainly the production of a dilettante in theology that as a scientific treatise it is valueless. A collected edition of the works of Jenyns appeared in 1790, with a biography by Charles Nelson Cole.