sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates, breathing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance.  But meanwhile it was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction and in a manner highly dramatic.  “He came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), without a band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course.”  There is a lurking humor in the grave Winthrop’s detailed account of Underhill’s doings.  Winthrop’s own personality comes out well in his Journal.  He was a born leader of men, a conditor imperii, just, moderate, patient, wise; and his narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring plantations.

Considering our forefathers’ errand and calling into this wilderness, it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and tracts in controversial theology.  Multitudes of these were written and published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that “when he was doing his Master’s business he would put a king into his pocket.”  Nor were their successors in the second or the third generation any less industrious and prolific.  They rest from their labors and their works do follow them.  Their sermons and theological treatises are not literature:  they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness which sometimes rises into eloquence.  The pulpit ruled New England, and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time.  The serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; the other world was all their art.  The daily secular events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were important enough to find record in print only in so far as they manifested God’s dealings with his people.  So much was the sermon depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in their note-books.  Franklin, in his Autobiography, describes this as the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his life of the elder Winthrop, says that “tho’ he wrote not after the preacher, yet such was his attention and such his retention in hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had heard in the congregation.”  These discourses were commonly of great length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto “fourteenthly.”