His second romance, ‘Crichton,’ appeared in 1836.  The hero of this tale is the brilliant Scottish gentleman whose handsome person, extraordinary scholarship, great accomplishments, courage, eloquence, subtlety, and achievement gained him the sobriquet of “The Admirable.”  The chief scenes are laid in Paris at the time of Catherine de’ Medici’s rule and Henry III.’s reign, when the air was full of intrigue and conspiracy, and when religious quarrels were not more bitter and dangerous than political wrangles.  The inscrutable king, the devout Queen Louise of Lorraine, the scheming queen-mother, and Marguerite of Valois, half saint, half profligate, a pearl of beauty and grace; Henry of Navarre, ready to buy his Paris with sword or mass; well-known great nobles, priests, astrologers, learned doctors, foreign potentates, ambassadors, pilgrims, and poisoners,—­pass before the reader’s eye.  The pictures of student life, at a time when all the world swarmed to the great schools of Paris, serve to explain the hero and the period.

[Illustration:  W. HARRISON AINSWORTH]

When, in 1839, Dickens resigned the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, Ainsworth succeeded him.  “The new whip,” wrote the old one afterward, “having mounted the box, drove straight to Newgate.  He there took in Jack Sheppard, and Cruikshank the artist; and aided by that very vulgar but very wonderful draughtsman, he made an effective story of the burglar’s and housebreaker’s life.”  Everybody read the story, and most persons cried out against so ignoble a hero, so mean a history, and so misdirected a literary energy.  The author himself seems not to have been proud of the success which sold thousands of copies of an unworthy book, and placed a dramatic version of its vulgar adventures on the stage of eight theatres at once.  He turned his back on this profitable field to produce, in rapid succession, ‘Guy Fawkes,’ a tale of the famous Gunpowder Plot; ‘The Tower of London,’ a story of the Princess Elizabeth, the reign of Queen Mary, and the melancholy episode of Lady Jane Grey’s brief glory; ‘Old Saint Paul,’ a story of the time of Charles II., which contains the history of the Plague and of the Great Fire; ‘The Miser’s Daughter’; ‘Windsor Castle,’ whose chief characters are Katharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, and Henry the Eighth; ‘St. James,’ a tale of the court of Queen Anne; ’The Lancashire Witches’; ‘The Star-Chamber,’ a historical story of the time of Charles I.; ‘The Constable of the Tower’; ‘The Lord Mayor of London’; ’Cardinal Pole,’ which deals with the court and times of Philip and Mary; ’John Law,’ a story of the great Mississippi Bubble; ‘Tower Hill,’ whose heroine is the luckless Catharine Howard; ‘The Spanish Match,’ a story of the romantic pilgrimage of Prince Charles and “Steenie” Buckingham to Spain for the fruitless wooing of the Spanish Princess; and at least ten other romances, many of them in three volumes, all appearing between 1840 and 1873.  Two of these were published simultaneously, in serial form; and no year passed without its book, to the end of the novelist’s long life.