I am not sure that I would not sooner give up
Raleigh spreading his cloak to keep the royal Dian's feet from the mud,
than that awful judgment upon the courtier whose Atlantean thighs leaked
away in bran through the rent in his trunk-hose. The painful fact that
Fisher had his head cut off is somewhat mitigated to me by the
circumstance that the Pope should have sent him, of all things in the
world, a cardinal's hat after that incapacitation. Theology herself
becomes less unamiable to me when I find the Supreme Pontiff writing to
the Council of Trent that "they should begin with original sin,
_maintaining yet a due respect for the Emperor_." That infallibility
should thus courtesy to decorum, shall make me think better of it while I
live. I shall accordingly endeavor to give my readers what amusement I
can, leaving it to themselves to extract solid improvement from the
volumes before us, which include a part of the correspondence of three
generations of Winthrops.
Let me premise that there are two men above all others for whom our
respect is heightened by these letters,--the elder John Winthrop and
Roger Williams. Winthrop appears throughout as a truly magnanimous and
noble man in an unobtrusive way,--a kind of greatness that makes less
noise in the world, but is on the whole more solidly satisfying than most
others,--a man who has been dipped in the river of God (a surer baptism
than Styx or dragon's blood) till his character is of perfect proof, and
who appears plainly as the very soul and life of the young Colony.
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