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 the benediction which either the choice of those who rest
beneath it, or the congenial tribute of some survivor, has selected to
close the epitaph. Only traces of the cellar of the mansion-house and of
its garden-plot are now visible to mark the home where the Chief
Magistrates of Massachusetts and Connecticut, father and son, had lived
together and had matured the "conclusions" on which they exiled
themselves.

A monstrous and idle tradition, heard by the visitor, as he surveyed the
outlines of his ancestral home, prompted him to that labor of love which
he has so felicitously performed, and with such providential helps, in a
biography. The absurdity of the tradition, equally defiant as it is of
the consistencies of character and the facts of chronology, is a warning
to those who rely on these floating confoundings of fact and fiction,