But we must return to Margaret, the bride.  It seems that there was some objection offered to Winthrop’s suit by the lady’s relatives.  In one of the two charming letters which are preserved as written during his courtship to her, he refers to some “unequall conflicte” which she had to bear.  These two letters, with one addressed to the lady by Father Adam, are unique as specimens of Puritan love-making.  Solomon’s Song is here put to the best use for which it is adapted, its only safe use.

The family-letters, which now increase in number, and vastly in their cheerfulness and radiance of spirit, and the birth of more children, present to us the most captivating glimpses of the English life of our first Chief Magistrate.  From a will which he made in Groton in 1620, of course superseded after his change of country, it appears that he had then five sons and one daughter.  The Lordship of Groton had been assigned to him by his father.  This was the year of the hegira of the Plymouth Pilgrims, but we have as yet no intimation that Winthrop was looking in this direction.

For more than a decade of years the family-history now passes on, for the most part placidly, interspersed with those incidents and anxieties which give alike the charm and the import to the routine of existence to any closely knit fellowships sharing it together.  Enough of the fragrant old material, in fast decaying papers, has come to light and been transcribed for security against all future risks, to preserve to us a fair restoration of the lights and shades of that domestic experience.  Time has dealt kindly in sparing a variety of specimens, so as to give to that restoration a kaleidoscopic character.  Winthrop’s frequent visits to London, on his professional errands, gave occasion to constant correspondence between him and his wife, and so we have epistles burdened with the intensities and refinements of the purest affection.  An occasional reference to church affairs by the Patron of Groton, with extracts from the record of his religious experience, continue for us the evidence that Winthrop was growing and deepening in the roots of his noble style of life.  His piety evidently ripened and mellowed into the richest fruitage which any form of theological or devotional faith can produce.  A severe and wellnigh fatal illness in London, which he concealed from his wife at Groton till its crisis was past, was made by him the occasion, as of many other good resolutions, so also of a renouncement of the use of tobacco, in which, by his own account, he, like many men as well as women at that time, had gone to excess.  His good wife, though positively enjoined by him not to venture upon the winter’s journey, in the letter which communicated to her the first tidings of his illness, immediately went to him in the great city, attended only by a female servant.  In a previous malady from which he had suffered severely in one of his hands while at home, his son John, in London, had consulted in his behalf one of the helpful female practitioners of the time, and the correspondence relating to her advice, her ointments, and their efficacy, gives us some curiously illustrative matter in the history of the healing art.  The good woman was sure that she could at once cure her patient, if he could be beneath her hands.  She would receive no compensation.