Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/46

 for a time he played with a fancy of making the stage his profession, and he was always an admirably dramatic reciter. At sixteen, Ainger passed to King's College, London, where Maurice was professor both of divinity and of English literature. Literature now absorbed Ainger. With Lamb and Crabbe, he discovered that he had many affinities. Devotion to Shakespeare manifested itself early and in 1855 he became first president of the college Shakespeare Society. A passionate love of music also developed into one of his chief resources. In October 1856 he matriculated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, with a view to a legal career. Henry Latham and Leslie Stephen were tutors of his college, while Henry Fawcett soon Ainger's intimate friend was elected a fellow in the year of Ainger's entrance. At Cambridge Ainger became the leading spirit of a literary circle which included Hugh Reginald Haweis [q. v. Suppl. II], Mr. Horace Smith, and Dr. A. W. Ward. He was a foremost contributor to a short-lived undergraduate magazine (3 nos. 1857-8), called 'The Lion,' which Haweis edited. Ainger's skit there on Macaulay and his criticisms of Shakespeare bore witness to his literary gifts and brilliant humour. At Cambridge, too, he came to know Alexander Macmillan, then a bookseller in Trinity Street, afterwards the famous London publisher, and was admitted to Macmillan's family circle.

Ainger's health allowed him to do no more than take the ordinary law examination (in June 1859). He graduated B. A. in 1860 and M.A. in 1865. His father's death in November 1859 made a waiting profession impossible for him and, acting upon his own inclination and upon the advice of his friends, Leslie Stephen among them, he took holy orders. In 1860 he was ordained deacon, and soon after became curate to Richard Haslehurst, Vicar of Alrewas, in Staffordshire. In 1863 he was ordained priest, and from 1864 to 1866 was assistant master in the Collegiate School at Sheffield. In the autumn of 1865 he had competed successfully for the readership at the Temple. That post he held for twenty-seven years, and in that capacity won a wide reputation as reader and preacher.

Both Ainger's sisters married early, the younger, Marianne, to a German named Wiss, and the elder, Adeline, to Dr. Roscow of Sandgate, who died in 1865. Shortly after his resettlement in London (1867) he experienced the great sorrow of his life in the sudden death of his widowed sister, Mrs. Roscow. The shock aged prematurely and turned his hair white. He became the guardian of his sister's four children—two girls and two boys, and devoted himself to their care. In 1876 Ainger moved to Hampstead, where his two nieces, Ada and Margaret Roscow, lived with him, and where he formed an intimacy with the artist of 'Punch,' George du Maurier [q. v. Suppl. I]. That companionship provided Ainger with a definite field for his wit. He constantly suggested the jests which du Maurier illustrated,.

He had an exceptional power of making friendships. When he came to the Temple, Dr. Thomas Robinson (1790-1873) [q. v.] was master; in 1869 Robinson was succeeded by Dr. Charles John Vaughan [q. v.], with whom Ainger formed close relations. The poet Tennyson was among his acquaintances ( Life, i. 117, ii. 327), and he was elected a member of the Literary Club which was founded by Dr. Johnson ( Notes from a Diary, passim). He was a copious correspondent, and his letters, always spontaneous, abounded, like his conversation, in sudden turns and airy quips.

Meanwhile Ainger made a position in literature. At twenty-two he contributed his first successful article, 'Books and their Uses,' to an early number of 'Macmillan's Magazine' (December 1859, i. 110). He took the whimsical pseudonym 'Doubleday' (Doubled A). Eleven other articles appeared under the same friendly auspices between 1871 and 1896. In the latest period of his life, 1900-4, he was a regular contributor to a weekly journal called the Pilot,' edited by Mr. D. C. Lathbury.

Ainger's chief writings dealt with the life and work of Charles Lamb, with whose genius he had native sympathy. His monograph on Lamb was published in 1882, in the 'English Men of Letters' series (revised and enlarged 1888). There followed editions of 'Lamb's Essays' (1883), 'Lamb's Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous Essays' (1884), and 'Lamb's Letters' (1888, new ed. 1904), the only collection which could lay claim at the time of publication to completeness. Ainger's life of Lamb and his edition of Lamb's writings embody much patient and original research. But Ainger was somewhat fastidious in his editorial method, and occasionally omitted from the letters characteristic passages which clashed with his conception of their writer's character. His labour remains a memorial of the editor's personal feeling and delicate