ves of it. But who that
knows John Winthrop through such materials of memory and such fruits of
high and noble service as up to this time have been accessible and
extant here has not longed for, and will not most heartily welcome, a
new contribution, coming by surprise, unlooked for, unhoped for even,
but yielding, from the very fountain-head, the means of a most intimate
converse with him in that period of his life till now wholly unrecorded
for us? We had known his character as displayed here. We have now a most
authentic and complete development of the process by which that
character was moulded and built abroad. The President of the
Massachusetts Historical Society has been privileged to do a service
which, with most rare felicity, embraces his indebtedness to his own
good name, to his official place, and to the city and State which have
invested him with so many of their highest honors.

The Honorable Robert C. Winthrop, a descendant in the seventh generation
from our honored First Governor, seizing upon a brief vacation-interval
in the course of his high public service, made a visit to England in the
summer of 1847. He was naturally drawn towards his ancestral home at
Groton, in Suffolk. The borough itself, with its own due share of
historic interest, from men of mark and their deeds, is composed of one
of those clusters of villages which are sure in an English landscape to
have some charm in their picturesque combinations. The visitor had the
privilege of worshipping on a Sunday in the same parish church where his
ancestors, holding the right of presentation, had joined in the same
form of service, to whose font they had brought their children in
baptism, and at whose altar-rails they had stood for "the solemnization
of matrimony," and knelt in the office of communion. The second entry
made in the parish register, still retained in the vestry, records the
death of the head of the family in 1562. Outside the church, and close
against its walls, is the tomb of the Winthrop family, which, by a happy
coincidence, had just been repaired, as if ready to receive a visitor
from a land where tombs are not supposed to have the justification of
age for being dilapidated. The father, the grandfather, and perhaps the
great-grandfather of our John Winthrop were committed to that
repository. The family name and arms, with a Latin inscription in memory
of the parents of the Governor, are legible still, "_Beati sunt
pacifici_" is