That tall, handsome, gentlemanly man, who sits at the head of the table, is John Winthrop, the new governor. See what an easy grace there is in his every movement; he has the port of one habituated to command, yet he is very gentle withal. His hair is just touched with silver, and he is in the prime of life—just forty-two, ripe and mellow. Winthrop is not a needy, sour adventurer; he comes of an ancient family long seated at Groton, in Suffolk, where he has a property whose income yields him six or seven hundred pounds a year—the equivalent of at least ten thousand dollars now-a-days. Evidently he quits England from some higher motive than to fatten his exchequer. This is he whom Cotton Mather terms the “Lycurgus of New England;” “as devout as Numa, but not liable to any of his heathenish madnesses; a governor in whom the excellences of Christianity made a most imposing addition unto the virtues wherein even without these he would have made a parallel for the great men of Greece and Rome whom the pen of Plutarch has eternized.”[664] A calm, unobtrusive, able gentleman, Winthrop had “studied that book, which, professing to teach politics, had but three leaves, and on each leaf but one word—MODERATION.” He had been initiated into the mysteries of state-craft when a boy, for from his youth he had moved in the circles where the highest questions of English policy were discussed and elaborated by the familiar associates of Whitgift, and Bacon, and Essex, and Cecil Burleigh.[665] At the right of Winthrop and chatting pleasantly with him, stands Thomas Dudley. He is short and thickset in stature, and stern in expression; a man fit to lead a forlorn hope. Quick and irascible in temper, uncompromising when he esteems himself in the right, every word he utters has the ring of authority. He is a man who speaks bullets. His head is grayer than Winthrop’s, but he is still robust, and he walks with a martial air—and no wonder, for he is a soldier. Thirty years before he had borne arms under Henri Quatre in the ranks of the Huguenots, a service which had indoctrinated him in the love of civil and religious liberty;[666] and he was old enough to have seen Sir Philip Sidney, heard Spencer recite verses to Elizabeth, and lent a shrill voice to the wild huzza at the defeat of the Spanish Armada.[667] But who is this that glides up to Winthrop, and, touching him upon the shoulder, speaks a word in his ear? It is John Humphrey, “a gentleman of special parts, of learning and activity, and a godly man.”[668] He does not sail now, but is here to bid his friends God-speed.