ndon, 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.

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
affai