A Pilgrimage to the Land of Barns, and Poem. By
Hew Ainslie. With a Memoir of the Author. By Thomas C. Latto. (Gardner.) —Hew Ainslie died at a great age in America, in 1878. In early life he wrote the Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, a medley of prose and verse. The volume was sent to Sir Walter Scott, whose esti- mate of it was not flattering. He observed that it lacked originality, and that "the author appears rather to have written as he thought Allan Ramsay or Burns would have written in his situation, than from the stream of his own thoughts." The criticism is a sound one. A few of Ainslie's songs deserve some praise for their music and for felicitous expression ; but the greater number show the skill of a rhymer who has striven vainly to be a poet; and the prose by which they are linked together is deficient in all the qualities that make good literature. "The Pilgrimage" is unworthy of the handsome form in which it is re- published, and the reputation of Hew Ainslie will gain nothing by the absurd eulogy of his biographer, who writes of his "rare and transcendent genius ; " and, after mentioning the names of Blackwood, Professor Wilson, Aytoun, and John Leyden, observes that Ainslie was worth " all the four men rolled together."
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