oton manor should have served, with other far
more constraining inducements, to excite in the visitor a purpose to
employ his first period of relief from official service in rendering an
act of public as well as of private obligation to the memory of his
progenitors,--especially as there existed no adequate and extended
biography, but only scattered and fragmentary memorials of them in our
copious literary stores. Happily for him, and surely to the highest
gratification of those who were to be his readers, materials most
abundant, and of the most authentic and self-revealing sort, in journals
and letters, were attainable, to give to the work essentially the
character of an autobiography, and that, too, of the most attractive
cast. A second visit of the author to England in 1859-60, and the most
opportune reception of a large collection of original papers, preserved
in another line of the Governor's descendants, put his fortunate
biographer in possession of the means for completing a work surpassed by
no similar volume known to us in the gracious attractions and in the
substantial interest of its contents. The book may safely rely for its
due reception upon the noble character, complete and harmonious in all
the virtues, and upon the eminent public services, of its subject. It
has other strong recommendations, affording, in style, method, and
spirit, a model for books of the same class, and embracing all those
paramount qualities of thoroughness, research, accuracy, good taste,
incidental illustration, and, above all, an appreciative spirit, which
stamp the worth of such labors.

We must leave almost unnoticed the author's elaborate chapter on the
pedigree and the early history of the Winthrop family. He is content to
begin this side of those who "came over with the Conqueror," and to
accept for ancestry men and women untitled, of the sterling English
stock, delvers of the soil, and spinners of the fabrics of which it
affords the raw material. He finds almost his own full name introducing
a record on the Rolls of Court in the County of York for the year 1200.
Adam Winthrop, grandfather of our Governor, himself the father, as he
was also the son of other Adams, was born in Lavenham, Suffolk, October
9, 1498, six years after the discovery of this country by Columbus, and
in the same year in which occurred the voyage of Vespucius, who gave his
name to the continent. This second Adam Winthrop, at the age of
seventeen, went t