and acquaintance. One matter, as we shall soon see, on which a fact in
the life, of Governor Winthrop depends, finds an unexpected disclosure
from Adam's pen. Here are a few excerpts from these entries:--"1597. The
VIth of July I received a privie seale to lend the Q. matie [Elizabeth]
£XX. for a yere."--"1602. Sept. the 27th day in ye mornying the Bell
did goe for mother [a conventional epithet] Tiffeyn, but she recouered."
This decides a matter which has sometimes been disputed,--that, while
with us, in our old times, "the passing bell" indicated the progress of
a funeral train, anciently in England it signified that a soul was
believed to be passing from a body supposed to be _in extremis_. And a
doleful sound it must have been to those of whom it made a false report,
as of "mother Tiffeyn."--"_Decem._ ye XXI day my brother Alibaster came
to my house & toulde me yt he made certayne inglishe verses in his
sleepe, wh. he recited unto me, & I lent him XLs."--"1603 April ye
28th day was the funeralles kept at Westminster for our late Queene
Elizabethe."--"1603. On Munday ye seconde of Maye, one Keitley, a
blackesmythe, dwellinge in Lynton in Cambridgeshire, had a poore man to
his father whom he kepte. A gentleman of ye same Towne sent a horse to
shoe, the father held up the horses legge whilest his soonne did shoe
him. The horse struggled & stroke the father on ye belly with his foote
& overthrewe him. The soonne laughed thereat & woulde not helpe his
father uppe, for the which some that were present reproved him greatlye.
The soonne went forwarde in shoinge of ye horse, & when he had donne he
went uppon his backe, mynding to goe home with him. The horse presently
did throughe him of his backe against a poste & clave his hed in sonder.
Mistress Mannocke did knowe ye man, for his mother was her nurse.
_Grave judicium Dei in irrisorem patris sui_." These little scraps of
Latin, sometimes running into a distich, are frequent signs of a certain
classical proclivity of the writer. Any one who should infer, from the
good man's arbitrary mode of spelling many words, that he was an