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.

It would appear from the entries in his father’s diaries that he was a member of college some eighteen months.  Why he left before completing his course is to find its explanation for us either in the extreme sickness before referred to as visited upon him there, or in the agreeable “change in his condition,” as the awkward and sheepish phrase is, which immediately followed.  The latter alternative leaves scope and offers temptations for such inventiveness of fancy about details and incidents, whys and wherefores, as the absence of all but the following stingy revelations may justify.  The good Adam, after recording, in November, 1604, and in the ensuing March, two mysterious rides with his son, has left, this, under date of March 28th, 1605:—­“My soonne was sollemly contracted to Mary Foorth, by Mr. Culverwell minister of Greate Stambridge in Essex cum consensu parentum.”  Another ride into Essex, this time by the son alone, is entered under April 9th, and then on the 16th his marriage, “AEtatis suae 17 [annis] 3 mensibus et 4 diebus completis.”  This reads pleasantly:—­“The VIIIth of May my soonne & his wife came to Groton from London, & ye IXth I made a marriage feaste, when Sr.  Thomas Mildmay & his lady my sister were present.  The same day my sister Veysye came to me, & departed on ye 24th of Maye.  My dawter Fones came the VIIIth & departed home ye XXIIId of Maye.”  An expeditious closing up, with honey-moon and marriage-feast, of an evident love-passage, whose longer or shorter antecedents are not revealed.  The biographer leaves his readers their choice of assigning the abrupt close of the college course of John Winthrop either to his grievous sickness, or to his love for Mary Forth, daughter and sole heir of John Forth, Esq.,