John Winthrop First Governor of the Masschusetts Colony

THE. COMING MAN 19
Providence ; with many deep-hearted
divine medi-
tations, and here and there acute discriminating
observations upon himself as a person whom, though
a cunning dissembler, he was learning to penetrate.
It is excellently well written, with pith and grace
of diction, and is thoroughly interesting to read
throughout. But it attends to one thing only. As
in the case of some like journals that were kept in
New England a century and a half later, in the times
of the Revolution, there is, beyond the merest hint
now and then, nothing to denote his concern in the
public movements and events with which the while
the land was in commotion. Yet it was impossible
that the unremitting fierce contention of People and
Crown in those years of James and his Buckingham,
when the English heritage of freedom seemed likely
to be lost, was not a concern of immense magnitude
to the serious young Puritan squire of Suffolk, — as
the issue to which it finally determined him proved
it to have been.
The twenty-five years from 1604, when Winthrop
assumed the duties of manhood, to 1629, when he
resolved on emigrating to Massachusetts, were a pe-
riod in England during which the comparative quiet
and prevalence of the spirit of toleration between
parties, both civil and ecclesiastical, which marked
the close of Elizabeth's reign, — whereof Bacon and
Richard Hooker may be considered exponents, —
were succeeded by the rekindling of all the elements
of strife, to blaze higher and ever higher till mounting
to the catastrophe of the Revolution.