together with so many English poems containing the contents of every chapter,’ which appeared in 1652.
Henry Ainsworth left behind him a large quantity of manuscripts, which appear to have been dispersed. This is known from a passage in one of Dr. John Worthington's letters, in which he bears an emphatic testimony both to the character and attainments of Henry Ainsworth. ‘There is another author, whose remains are most worthy to be retrieved—I mean Mr. Ainsworth, whose excellent annotations upon the Pentateuch, &c. sufficiently discover his great learning and his most exact observation of the proper idioms of the holy text, with every iota and tittle of which he seems to be as much acquainted as any of the Masoreths of Tiberias.’ Dr. Worthington goes on to mention works on Hosea, Matthew, and the Epistles to the Hebrews, which Ainsworth had left, but which, owing to some difficulty as to price or copyright between Ainsworth's son and his successor, John Canne, had not been printed. The value of Ainsworth's exegetical writings has been attested by Cotton, Doddridge, Calmet, Poole, and Clarke. Time has not entirely destroyed the value of his annotations; for they have been found helpful to the company of Old Testament revisers (Dexter, p. 342). His character was that of a modest, amiable, and conciliatory man, acting with moderation under difficult circumstances, unwilling to enter upon controversy, and yet not shrinking from it when duty called. Perhaps his greatest service to English nonconformity was the establishment of a tradition of learning and culture. Even those of the world who despised the sectary admired the scholar whose acquirements in rabbinical and oriental literature—as it was then understood—were equalled by few in Europe. This combination led Moreri and others to suppose that Henry Ainsworth the annotator and Henry Ainsworth the Brownist were distinct individuals.
Dexter has shown that Henry Ainsworth, who is described as a minister, thirty-six years of age and from Swanton, married Margery Halie, from Ipswich, widow of Richard Appelbey, 29 March 1607. He also quotes a passage from Paget—certainly an unscrupulous and biassed witness—who declares that Ainsworth was originally a member of the church of England—as, indeed, he must have been—separated from her, then in London rejoined her communion, but left her, and once more, when in Ireland, ‘and in some danger for your scandall,’ at least nominally resumed his allegiance. Even if there were any wavering in Ainsworth's youth, which is by no means certain, yet during all the period of his public life from 1596 to his death we find him constant to the despised and unpopular form of Christianity which he had adopted.
Before his death Ainsworth for a time left Amsterdam and revisited Ireland, but returned to his city of exile, where he died late in 1622 or early in 1623. Neal has given a strange narration of his death, which, if too absurd for credence, is too circumstantial to be omitted. ‘His death,’ he says, ‘was sudden, and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he advertised it in print, and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire; but Ainsworth, though poor, would accept of nothing but a conference with some of his rabbies upon the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it, 'tis thought that he was poisoned.’ Brook's version is that the conference took place, and the champion of Christianity was poisoned by his defeated antagonists.
[Works of John Robinson, Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, London, 1851 ; Two Treatises by Henry Ainsworth (with some account of the life and writings of the author), Edinburgh, 1789; Neal's History of the Puritans, ii. 43; Brook's Lives of the Puritans, ii. 299; Abram's History of Blackburn, Blackburn, 1877; Baxter's Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, 1880 (containing, at p. 296, a facsimile of Henry Ainsworth's signature); Baines's Lancashire; Halley's Lancashire Puritanism; British Museum General Catalogue.]
AINSWORTH, ROBERT (1660–1743), lexicographer, was born at Woodyale, in the parish of Eccles, four miles from Manchester, in September 1660. He received his education at Bolton, in Lancashire, and afterwards kept a school in that town. In or before 1698 he removed to London, and for a time he was master of ‘a considerable boarding-school’ at Bethnal Green. During his residence there he published, probably as a kind of advertisement, a very suggestive pamphlet on ‘The most Natural and Easie Way of Institution,’ containing various useful proposals in the direction of educational reform. He afterwards removed his school to Hackney, and carried it on successively at other villages in the neighbourhood of the metropolis.
Having acquired a moderate fortune, Ainsworth gave up his school, and spent the remainder of his life in a private manner. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Anti-
