A mystery has attached to a certain “office” which Winthrop held in London, and to which, in one of his previously published letters, he referred as having lost it.  It now appears that that office was an Attorneyship of the Court of Wards and Liveries, an honorable and responsible trust.  Its duties, with other provisional engagements, separated him so much from his home at one period, that he meditated the removal of his family from Groton.  His wife’s letters on the subject are delightful revelations of confidences.  It is still only by inference that we can assign the loss of his office, to the business of which we have many references, to any especial cause.  It may have been surrendered by him because he longed for more home-life, or because the growing spirit of discontent and apprehension as to the state of public affairs, which he shared with so many of his friends, made him obnoxious to the controlling heads in civil life.

We have also some admirable specimens of his correspondence with his son John, who, after his preliminary education at the school at Bury St. Edmund’s, became, in 1622, in his seventeenth year, a member of Trinity College, Dublin, near his uncle and aunt Downing, parents of the famous Sir George Downing.  These are beautiful and wise and generous expressions of a father’s love and advice and dealings with a son, exposed to temptation at a critical age, and giving promise of the abilities and virtues which he afterwards exhibited so nobly as Governor of Connecticut.  In one of the letters, to which the father asks replies in Latin, he writes, “I will not limit your allowance less than to ye uttermost of mine own estate.  So as, if L20 be too little (as I always accounted it), you shall have L30; & when that shall not suffice, you shall have more.  Only hold a sober & frugal course (yet without baseness), & I will shorten myself to enlarge you.”  In another letter there is this fit commemoration of his father, Adam, dying at the age of seventy-five:—­“I am sure, before this, you have knowledge of that wh., at the time when you wrote, you were ignorant of:  viz., the departure of your grandfather (for I wrote over twice since).  He hath finished his course:  & is gathered to his people in peace, as the ripe corn into the barn.  He thought long for ye day of his dissolution, & welcomed it most gladly.  Thus is he gone before; & we must go after, in our time.  This advantage he hath of us,—­he shall not see ye evil wh. we may meet with ere we go hence.  Happy those who stand in good terms with God & their own conscience:  they shall not fear evil tidings:  & in all changes they shall be ye same.”

There are likewise letters to the student at Dublin from his brother Forth, who succeeded him at the school at St. Edmund’s.  It is curious to note in these epistles of the school-boy the indifferent success of his manifestly sincere effort to use the technical language of Puritanism and to express its aims and ardors.  The youth evidently feels freer when writing of the fortunes of some of his school-mates.  This same Forth Winthrop became in course a student at Cambridge, and we have letters to his father, carried by the veritable Hobson immortalized by Milton.