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.