Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864
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Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864
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21 [Transcriber's note: All footnotes moved to end of document]
THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF
LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOLUME XIII.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
135, WASHINGTON STREET.
* * * * *
LONDON: TRUeBNER AND COMPANY.
M DCCC LXIV.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
PRINTED BY SAM'L CHISM, Franklin Printing House, 112 Congress St.,
Boston
RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED BY H.O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY
CONTENTS.
Ambassadors in Bonds _Caroline Chesebro_
Annesley Hall and Newstead Abbey _Mrs. R.C. Waterston_
Beginning of the End, The _C.C. Hazewell_
Bryant _G.S. Hillard_
California as a Vineland
Convulsionists of St. Medard, The _Robert Dale Owen_
Cruise on Lake Ladoga, A _Bayard Taylor_
Fast-Day at Foxden, A
Fighting Facts for Fogies _C.C. Hazewell_
First Visit to Washington, The _J.T. Trowbridge_
Fouquet the Magnificent _F. Sheldon_
Genius _J. Brownlee Brown_
Glacial Period _Prof. Louis Agassiz_
Glaciers, External Appearance of _Prof. Louis Agassiz_
Glen Roy, in Scotland, The Parallel Roads of _Prof. Louis Agassiz_
Gold-Fields of Nova Scotia, The _Arthur Gilman_
Guides, A Talk about _Maria S. Cummins_
Half-Life, A, and Half a Life _Miss E.H. Appleton_
House and Home Papers _Harriet Beecher Stowe_
Irving, Washington _Donald G. Mitchell_
Life on the Sea Islands _Miss Forten_
Minister Plenipotentiary, The _O.W. Holmes_
Mormons, Among the _Fitz-Hugh Ludlow_
My Book _Gail Hamilton_
New-England Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, The, _J.G. Palfrey_
Northern Invasions _E.E. Hale_
Old Bachelor, Some Account of the Early Life of an _Mrs. A.M. Diaz_
Our Progressive Independence _O.W. Holmes_
Our Soldiers _Mrs. Furness_
Peninsular Campaign, The _Lt.-Col. B.L. Alexander_
Pictor Ignotus _Gail Hamilton_
Presidential Election, The _C.C. Hazewell_
Queen of California, The _E.E. Hale_
Ray _Harriet E. Prescott_
Relation of Art to Nature, On the _J. Eliot Cabot_
Rim, The _Harriet E. Prescott_
Robson _George Augustus Sala_
Schoolmaster's Story, The _Mrs. A.M. Diaz_
Stephen Yarrow _Author of "Life in the Iron Mills"_
Thackeray, William Makepeace _Bayard Taylor_
Types _William Winter_
Victory, How to Use _E.E. Hale_
Yo-Semite, Seven Weeks in the Great _Fitz-Hugh Ludlow_
Wet-Weather Work _Donald G. Mitchell_
Whittier _D.A. Wasson_
Winthrop, Governor John, in Old England _G.E. Ellis_
POETRY.
Black Preacher, The _J.R. Lowell_
Brother of Mercy, The _John G. Whittier_
Dante's "Paradiso," Three Cantos of _H.W. Longfellow_
Gold Hair _Robert Browning_
Kalif of Baldacca, The _H.W. Longfellow_
Last Charge, The _O.W. Holmes_
Memoriae Positum R.G.S _J.R. Lowell_
My Brother and I _J.T. Trowbridge_
Neva, The _Bayard Taylor_
On Picket Duty _Mrs. W.T. Johnson_
Our Classmate _O.W. Holmes_
Planting of the Apple-Tree, The _W.C. Bryant_
Presence _Alice, Gary_
Prospice _Robert Browning_
Reaper's Dream, The _T.B. Read_
Reenlisted _Lucy Larcom_
Shakspeare _O.W. Holmes_
Snow _Elizabeth A.C. Akers_
Snow-Man, The _C.J. Sprague_
Song _Alice Cary_
To a Young Girl Dying _T.W. Parsons_
Under the Cliff _Robert Browning_
Wreck of Rivermouth, The _John G. Whittier_
REVIEWS AND LITERACY NOTICES.
Adams's Church Pastorals
Agassiz's Methods of Study in Natural History
Alger's Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
Boynton's History of West Point
Browning's Sordello, Strafford, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day
Craik's History of English Literature
Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe
Dream Children
Foederalist, The, Dawson's Edition
Gillett's Life and Times of Huss
Hallam's Remains
Hannah Thurston
Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire
Mill's Principles of Political Economy
My Days and Nights on the Battle-field
My Farm of Edgewood
Peculiar
Possibilities of Creation
Ray's Mental Hygiene
Renan, De l'Origine du Langage
Smiles's Industrial Biography
Spencer's Illustrations of Progress
Thackeray's Roundabout Papers
Ticknor's Life of Prescott
Tuckerman's Poems
Tyndall on Heat
Weiss's Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker
RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS
THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. XIII.--JANUARY, 1864--NO. LXXV.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
* * * * *
GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP IN OLD ENGLAND.
Our magazine was introduced to the world bearing on the cover of its
first number a vignette of the portraiture of the ever honored and
revered John Winthrop, first Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts
Bay. The effigies expressed a countenance, features, and a tone of
character in beautiful harmony with all that we know of the man, all
that he was and did. Gravity and loftiness of soul, tempered by a mild
and tender delicacy, depth of experience, resolution of purpose, native
dignity, acquired wisdom, and an harmonious equipoise of the robust
virtues and the winning graces have set their unmistakable tokens on
those lineaments. That vignette, after renewing from month to month
before our readers, for nearly four years, as gracious and fragrant a
memory as can engage the love of a New-England heart, gave place, in the
month of June, 1861, to the only emblem, no longer personal, which might
claim to supplant it. The national flag, during a struggle which has
seen its dignity insulted only to rouse and nerve the spirit which shall
vindicate its glory, has displaced that bearded and ruffed portraiture.
The visitor to the Massachusetts State-House may see, hanging in its
Senate-Chamber, tolerably well preserved on its canvas, what is
believed, on trustworthy evidence, to be Vandyck's own painting of
Winthrop. Another portrait of him--not so agreeable to the eye, nor so
faithful, we are sure, to the original, yet reputed to date from the
lifetime of its subject--hangs in the Hall of the American Antiquarian
Society at Worcester. Those of our readers who have not lovingly pored
and paused over Mr. Savage's elaborately illustrated edition of Governor
Winthrop's Journal do not know what a profitable pleasure invites them,
whenever they shall have grace to avail themselves of it. But who that
knows John Winthrop through such materials of memory and such fruits of
high and noble service as up to this time have been accessible and
extant here has not longed for, and will not most heartily welcome, a
new contribution, coming by surprise, unlooked for, unhoped for even,
but yielding, from the very fountain-head, the means of a most intimate
converse with him in that period of his life till now wholly unrecorded
for us? We had known his character as displayed here. We have now a most
authentic and complete development of the process by which that
character was moulded and built abroad. The President of the
Massachusetts Historical Society has been privileged to do a service
which, with most rare felicity, embraces his indebtedness to his own
good name, to his official place, and to the city and State which have
invested him with so many of their highest honors.
The Honorable Robert C. Winthrop, a descendant in the seventh generation
from our honored First Governor, seizing upon a brief vacation-interval
in the course of his high public service, made a visit to England in the
summer of 1847. He was naturally drawn towards his ancestral home at
Groton, in Suffolk. The borough itself, with its own due share of
historic interest, from men of mark and their deeds, is composed of one
of those clusters of villages which are sure in an English landscape to
have some charm in their picturesque combinations. The visitor had the
privilege of worshipping on a Sunday in the same parish church where his
ancestors, holding the right of presentation, had joined in the same
form of service, to whose font they had brought their children in
baptism, and at whose altar-rails they had stood for "the solemnization
of matrimony," and knelt in the office of communion. The second entry
made in the parish register, still retained in the vestry, records the
death of the head of the family in 1562. Outside the church, and close
against its walls, is the tomb of the Winthrop family, which, by a happy
coincidence, had just been repaired, as if ready to receive a visitor
from a land where tombs are not supposed to have the justification of
age for being dilapidated. The father, the grandfather, and perhaps the
great-grandfather of our John Winthrop were committed to that
repository. The family name and arms, with a Latin inscription in memory
of the parents of the Governor, are legible still, "_Beati sunt
pacifici_" is the benediction which either the choice of those who rest
beneath it, or the congenial tribute of some survivor, has selected to
close the epitaph. Only traces of the cellar of the mansion-house and of
its garden-plot are now visible to mark the home where the Chief
Magistrates of Massachusetts and Connecticut, father and son, had lived
together and had matured the "conclusions" on which they exiled
themselves.
A monstrous and idle tradition, heard by the visitor, as he surveyed the
outlines of his ancestral home, prompted him to that labor of love which
he has so felicitously performed, and with such providential helps, in a
biography. The absurdity of the tradition, equally defiant as it is of
the consistencies of character and the facts of chronology, is a warning
to those who rely on these floating confoundings of fact and fiction,
which, as some one has said, "are almost as misleading as history." Two
hundred years and more had seen that manor-house deserted of its former
occupants. The neighboring residents had kept their name in remembrance,
more, probably, through the help of the tomb than of the dwelling.
Speculation and romance would deal with them as an extinct or an exiled
family. The story had become current on the spot, that the Winthrops
were regicides, and had fled to America, having, however, buried some
precious hoard of money about their premises before their flight. Our
author suggests the altogether likely idea that a suspicion might have
attached to him as having come over to search for that treasure. Little
may he have imagined what thoughts may have distracted the reverence of
some of his humble fellow-worshippers in Groton Church who whispered the
nature of his errand one to another. Our honored Governor and his son of
Connecticut had been near a score of years on this soil before Charles
I. was beheaded. Mr. Savage informs us that he was once asked by a
descendant of the father whether he had received before his death
tidings of the execution of his old master. The annotator is able to
quote a letter from Roger Williams, "to his honored kind friend, Mr.
John Winthrop at Nameag," [New London,] lettered on the back, "Mr.
Williams of ye high news about the king." This letter, conveying recent
tidings, was dated at Narragansett, June 26, 1649, two months after the
elder Winthrop had died in Boston.
It was but natural that even the absurdity of the tradition lingering
around the traces of the Groton manor should have served, with other far
more constraining inducements, to excite in the visitor a purpose to
employ his first period of relief from official service in rendering an
act of public as well as of private obligation to the memory of his
progenitors,--especially as there existed no adequate and extended
biography, but only scattered and fragmentary memorials of them in our
copious literary stores. Happily for him, and surely to the highest
gratification of those who were to be his readers, materials most
abundant, and of the most authentic and self-revealing sort, in journals
and letters, were attainable, to give to the work essentially the
character of an autobiography, and that, too, of the most attractive
cast. A second visit of the author to England in 1859-60, and the most
opportune reception of a large collection of original papers, preserved
in another line of the Governor's descendants, put his fortunate
biographer in possession of the means for completing a work surpassed by
no similar volume known to us in the gracious attractions and in the
substantial interest of its contents. The book may safely rely for its
due reception upon the noble character, complete and harmonious in all
the virtues, and upon the eminent public services, of its subject. It
has other strong recommendations, affording, in style, method, and
spirit, a model for books of the same class, and embracing all those
paramount qualities of thoroughness, research, accuracy, good taste,
incidental illustration, and, above all, an appreciative spirit, which
stamp the worth of such labors.
We must leave almost unnoticed the author's elaborate chapter on the
pedigree and the early history of the Winthrop family. He is content to
begin this side of those who "came over with the Conqueror," and to
accept for ancestry men and women untitled, of the sterling English
stock, delvers of the soil, and spinners of the fabrics of which it
affords the raw material. He finds almost his own full name introducing
a record on the Rolls of Court in the County of York for the year 1200.
Adam Winthrop, grandfather of our Governor, himself the father, as he
was also the son of other Adams, was born in Lavenham, Suffolk, October
9, 1498, six years after the discovery of this country by Columbus, and
in the same year in which occurred the voyage of Vespucius, who gave his
name to the continent. This second Adam Winthrop, at the age of
seventeen, went to London, binding himself as an apprentice for ten
years under the well-esteemed and profitable guild of the "clothiers,"
or cloth-workers. At the expiration of his apprenticeship, in 1526, he
was sworn a citizen of London, and, after filling the subordinate
dignities of his craft, rose to the mastership of his company in 1551.
The Lordship of the Manor of Groton, at the dissolution of the
monasteries, was granted to Adam Winthrop in 1544. Retaining his
mercantile relations in the great city, and probably residing there at
intervals, he seated himself in landed dignity at his manor, and there
he died in 1562. His memorialist now holds in his possession the
original bronze plate which was put upon his tomb three hundred years
ago, and which was probably removed to give place to the new inscription
connected with the repairs already referred to. This ancient sepulchral
brass bears in quaint old English characters the following
inscription:--"Here lyeth Mr. Adam Wynthrop, Lorde & Patron of Groton,
whiche departed owt of this Worlde the IXth day of November, in the
yere of owre Lorde God MCCCCCLXII." His widow, who had been his second
wife, married William Mildmay; and his daughter Alice married Mr.
Mildmay's son Thomas, who, being afterwards knighted, secured to the
cloth-worker's daughter the title of "Lady Mildmay." In the cabinet of
the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, the visitor, on the
asking, may be gratified with the sight and touch of a curious old relic
which will bring him almost into contact with a most agreeable
family-circle of the olden time. It is a serviceable posset-pot, with a
silver tip and lid, both of which are gilded, the cover, still playing
faithfully on its hinge, being chased with the device of Adam and Eve in
the garden partaking of the forbidden fruit. An accompanying record
reads as follows:--"At ye Feast of St. Michael, Ano. 1607, my Sister,
ye Lady Mildmay, did give me a Stone Pot, tipped & covered wth. a
Silver Lydd." How many comforting concoctions and compounds, alternating
with herb-drinks and medicated potions, may have been quaffed or
swallowed with wry face from that precious old cup, who can now tell?
Probably it ministered its more inviting contents to the elders of the
successive generations in the family, while it was known by the younger
members in their turn in connection with certain penalties for
overeating and chills got from hard play. While having the relic in
hand, the other day, the prompting was irresistible to bring it close to
the appropriate organ, to ascertain, if possible, what had been the
predominant character of its contents. But, faithful as the grave, it
would reveal no secrets; having parted with all transient and artificial
odors, it has resumed, as is most fitting, the smell of its parent
earth.
The writer of that record accompanying the "Stone-Pot" with its "Silver
Lydd" was Adam Winthrop, father of our Governor, and son of the
last-mentioned Lord of Groton. This third Adam Winthrop--the sixth child
of his father's second wife, and the eleventh of his thirteen
children--was born in London, "in the street which is called Gracious,"
(Grace-Church,) August 10, 1548. Losing his father at the age of
fourteen, he was early bred as a lawyer in London, but soon engaged in
agricultural interests at Groton, to the lordship of which he acceded by
a license of alienation from an elder brother. There are sundry
authentic relics and tokens of this good man which reveal to us those
traits of his character, and those ways and influences of his domestic
life, under the high-toned, yet most genial training of which his son
was educated to the great enterprise Providence intended for him. There
are even poetical pieces extant which prove that Adam sought intercourse
with the Muses by making advances on his own part, though we must
confess that he does not appear to have been fairly met half-way by that
capricious and fastidious sisterhood. Many of his almanacs and diaries,
with entries dating from 1595, and from which the author makes liberal
and interesting transcripts in an Appendix, have been happily preserved,
and have a grateful use to us. They help us to reconstruct an old home,
a pleasant one, in or near which three generations of a good stock lived
together after the highest pattern of an orderly, exemplary, prospered,
and pious household. We infer from many significant trifles, that, while
the old English comfort-loving, generous, and hospitable style prevailed
there, the severer spirit of Puritanism had not attained ascendancy.
Intercourse with the metropolis, though embarrassed with conditions
requiring some buffeting and hardship, was compensated by the zest of
adventure, and it was frequent enough to quicken the minds and to add to
the bodily comforts and refinements of the family. Adam Winthrop must
have been a fine specimen of the old English gentleman, with all of
native polish which courtly experiences might or might not have given
him, and with a simple, high-toned, upright, and neighborly spirit,
which made him an apt and a faithful administrator of a great variety of
trusts. His old Bible, now in the possession of Mr. George Livermore of
Cambridge, represented the divine presence and law in his household,
for all its members, parents and children, masters and servants. He
entertained hospitably his full share of "the godly preachers," who were
the wandering luminaries, and, in some respects, the angelic visitants
of those days. He was evidently a very patient listener to sermons,
though we have not the proof in any surviving notebooks of his that one
of his excellent son John's furnishes us, that he took pains to
transcribe the heads, the savory passages, and the textual attestations
of the elaborate, but utterly juiceless sermons of the time. The entries
in his almanacs afford a curious variety, in which interesting events of
public importance alternate with homely details touching the affairs of
his neighborhood and the incidents in the domestic life of his relatives
and acquaintance. One matter, as we shall soon see, on which a fact in
the life, of Governor Winthrop depends, finds an unexpected disclosure
from Adam's pen. Here are a few excerpts from these entries:--"1597. The
VIth of July I received a privie seale to lend the Q. matie [Elizabeth]
LXX. for a yere."--"1602. Sept. the 27th day in ye mornying the Bell
did goe for mother [a conventional epithet] Tiffeyn, but she recouered."
This decides a matter which has sometimes been disputed,--that, while
with us, in our old times, "the passing bell" indicated the progress of
a funeral train, anciently in England it signified that a soul was
believed to be passing from a body supposed to be _in extremis_. And a
doleful sound it must have been to those of whom it made a false report,
as of "mother Tiffeyn."--"_Decem._ ye XXI day my brother Alibaster came
to my house & toulde me yt he made certayne inglishe verses in his
sleepe, wh. he recited unto me, & I lent him XLs."--"1603 April ye
28th day was the funeralles kept at Westminster for our late Queene
Elizabethe."--"1603. On Munday ye seconde of Maye, one Keitley, a
blackesmythe, dwellinge in Lynton in Cambridgeshire, had a poore man to
his father whom he kepte. A gentleman of ye same Towne sent a horse to
shoe, the father held up the horses legge whilest his soonne did shoe
him. The horse struggled & stroke the father on ye belly with his foote
& overthrewe him. The soonne laughed thereat & woulde not helpe his
father uppe, for the which some that were present reproved him greatlye.
The soonne went forwarde in shoinge of ye horse, & when he had donne he
went uppon his backe, mynding to goe home with him. The horse presently
did throughe him of his backe against a poste & clave his hed in sonder.
Mistress Mannocke did knowe ye man, for his mother was her nurse.
_Grave judicium Dei in irrisorem patris sui_." These little scraps of
Latin, sometimes running into a distich, are frequent signs of a certain
classical proclivity of the writer. Any one who should infer, from the
good man's arbitrary mode of spelling many words, that he was an
illiterate person, would be grievously mistaken, in his ignorance of the
universal characteristic and license of that age in that matter. The
Queen herself was by no means so good a "speller," by our standard, as
was Adam Winthrop. The extraordinary way in which letters were then left
out of words where they were needed, and most lavishly multiplied where
no possible use could be made of them, is a phenomenon never accounted
for.
Adam Winthrop was for several years auditor of the accounts of Trinity
and St. John's Colleges, Cambridge, and records his visits to the
University in the discharge of his duties. We have specimens of a
pleasant correspondence between him and his sister, Lady Mildmay, also
with his wife, marked by a sweet and gentle tone, the utterance of a
kindly spirit,--fragrant records of hearts once so warm with love.
It must have been with supreme delight that Adam entered in his diary,
that on January 12, 1587, [January 22, 1588, N.S.,] was born his only
son, John, one of five children by his second wife. John came into the
world between the years that marked, respectively, the execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots, and the visit of the Spanish Armada. We can well
conceive under what gracious and godly influences he received his early
nurture. His mother died only one year before he, at the age of
forty-two, embarked for America, his father having not long preceded
her. Evidence abundant was in our possession that John Winthrop had
received what even now would be called a good education, and what in his
own time was a comparatively rare one. It had generally been taken for
granted, however, that he had never been a member of either of the
Universities. His present biographer tells us that long before
undertaking his present grateful task he had never been reconciled to
admit the inference which had been drawn from silence on this point. He
remembered, by references in his own reading, that by some oversight
there had been an omission of names in the Cambridge University Register
from June, 1589, to June, 1602, and that no admissions were recorded
earlier than 1625. John Winthrop might, therefore, have at least "gone
to college," if he had not "gone through college." His biographer had
also noticed in the Governor's "Christian Experience," drawn up and
signed by him in New England on his forty-ninth birthday, 1636-7, an
allusion to his having been at Cambridge when "about 14 yrs of age," and
having had a lingering fever there. An entry in the records of his
father must have been a most grateful discovery to the Governor's
descendant in the seventh generation. "1602. The 2d of December I rode
to Cambridge. The VIIIth day John my soonne was admitted into Trinitie
College." But the old mystery vanishes only to give place to another,
which has a spice of romance in it. John Winthrop did not graduate at
Cambridge. He was a lawful husband when seventeen years of age, and a
happy father at eighteen.
In a time-stained and most precious document from his pen and from his
heart, relating his religious experience, to be referred to more
particularly by-and-by, he charges himself in his youth with grievous
sin. What we know of his whole life and character would of itself forbid
us to accept literally his severe self-judgment, much more to draw from
his language the inference which like language would warrant, if used in
our times. Those who have even but a superficial acquaintance with
religious diaries, especially with such as date from near that age, need
not be told that their writers, when sincerely devout by the Puritan
standard, aimed to search and judge their own hearts and lives with all
that penetrating, self-revealing, unsparing scrutiny and severity which
they believed were turned upon them by the all-seeing eye of infinite
purity. They wished to anticipate the Great Tribunal, and to avert the
surprise of any new disclosure there by admitting to themselves while
still in the flesh the worst that it could pronounce against them. Men
and women who before the daily companions and witnesses of their lives
would stand stoutly, and honestly too, in self-defence against all
imputations, and might even boast themselves--as St. Paul did--of a
surplusage of merits of some sort, when registering the barometer and
the thermometer of their religious experience were the most unrelenting
self-accusers. It is safe to say, as a general thing, that those who in
that introspection, in the measurement of their heats and chills of
piety, grieved most deeply and found the most ingenious causes for
self-infliction were either the most calculating hypocrites or the most
truly godly. To which of the two classes any one particular individual
might belong could not always be infallibly concluded from what he
wrote. That comfort-loving and greed-indulging, yet picturesque, old
sinner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., did not profess to keep a religious diary.
But many such diaries have been kept by men who might have covered
alternate pages with matter similar to his own, or with worse. We must
interpret the religious diaries of that age by aids independent of
those which their contents furnish us. John Winthrop, writing of his
youth when he had grown to the full exalted stature of Christian
manhood, and though sweetly mellowed in the graces of his character by
genial ripening from within his soul, was still a Puritan of the
severest standard theologically, and, by principle, charges himself with
heinous sin. We feel assured that he was not only guiltless of any folly
or error that would deserve such a designation, but that he even
overstated the degree of his addiction to the lighter human faults. Only
after such a preliminary assertion of incredulity as to any literal
truth in them, could we consent to copy his own words, as follows:--"In
my youth I was very lewdly disposed, inclining unto & attempting (so far
as my heart enabled me) all kinds of wickedness, except swearing &
scorning religion, wh. I had no temptation unto in regard of my
education. About ten years of age I had some notions of God: for, in
some frighting or danger, I have prayed unto God, & found manifest
answer: ye remembrance whereof, many years after, made me think that
God did love me: but it made me no whit the better. After I was twelve
years old, I began to have some more savor of religion: & I thought I
had more understanding in divinity than many of my years," etc. Yes, he
evidently had. And though the kind of "divinity" which had trained his
soul was of a grim sort, his own purity and gentleness of spirit
softened it while accepting it. He adds,--"Yet I was still very wild &
dissolute: & as years came on, my lusts grew stronger, but yet under
some restraint of my natural reason, whereby I had that command of
myself that I could turn into any form. I would, as occasion required,
write letters, &c. of mere vanity; & if occasion was, I could write
savoury & godly counsel." Seeing, however, that he was made a Justice of
the Peace when eighteen years of age, the inference is a fair one--his
own self-accusation to the contrary notwithstanding--that he was known
in his own neighborhood as a youth of extraordinary excellence of
character.
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