capricious and fastidious sisterhood. Many of his almanacs and diaries,
with entries dating from 1595, and from which the author makes liberal
and interesting transcripts in an Appendix, have been happily preserved,
and have a grateful use to us. They help us to reconstruct an old home,
a pleasant one, in or near which three generations of a good stock lived
together after the highest pattern of an orderly, exemplary, prospered,
and pious household. We infer from many significant trifles, that, while
the old English comfort-loving, generous, and hospitable style prevailed
there, the severer spirit of Puritanism had not attained ascendancy.
Intercourse with the metropolis, though embarrassed with conditions
requiring some buffeting and hardship, was compensated by the zest of
adventure, and it was frequent enough to quicken the minds and to add to
the bodily comforts and refinements of the family. Adam Winthrop must
have been a fine specimen of the old English gentleman, with all of
native polish which courtly experiences might or might not have given
him, and with a simple, high-toned, upright, and neighborly spirit,
which made him an apt and a faithful administrator of a great variety of
trusts. His old Bible, now in the possession of Mr. George Livermore of
Cambridge, represented the divine presence and law in his household,
for all its members, parents and children, masters and servants. He
entertained hospitably his full share of "the godly preachers," who were
the wandering luminaries, and, in some respects, the angelic visitants
of those days. He was evidently a very patient listener to sermons,
though we have not the proof in any surviving notebooks of his that one
of his excellent son John's furnishes us, that he took pains to
transcribe the heads, the savory passages, and the textual attestations
of the elaborate, but utterly juiceless sermons of the time. The entries
in his almanacs afford a curious variety, in which interesting events of
public importance alternate with homely details touching the affairs of
his neighborhood and the incidents in the domestic life of his relatives