Mr. Winsor's Letter about Southwark.

Vivid and picturesque descriptions of various historic corners of England are those which Mr. Justin Winsor gives in his letter to the New York Evening Post. His last letter to that paper tells of a delightful jaunt through Southwark, the home of John Harvard.

"Southwark," says Mr. Winsor, "is now in the see of Rochester, and in the midst of the rebuilding of St. Saviour's Church, the old St. Mary Overy's, the good bishop-not unknown to us in America from his visits there-would interest all Harvardians in the shrine that the probable baptism of John Harvard within its walls has sanctified in their memories. It is certain that the St. Saviour's School, which formerly stood adjacent to the church, had in those early days the father of John Harvard among its governors. Amid the changes which Southwark has undergone, so that most of the ancient landmarks are obliterated which connect it with names already mentioned, the school at which Harvard may have been a pupil, and which Queen Elizabeth founded, disappeared, and the building which it now occupies, nearer Southwark bridge, is already dingy with the damp and smoke of sixty years.

"St. Saviour's is associated with the very beginnings of English literature, as well as with the memory of that Englishman who gave the first practical impulse to the founding of education in New England. If the strange rudimentary English of Gower had little to attract that young scholar of St. Saviour's-as we may well believe him to have been a pupil of the school of which his father was a governor-there was a later literature as well as a later history associated with St. Saviour's and the Bankside that a youth intended for the church even then, and maybe possessing budding Puritan principles, may not have been unconscious of; while those evidences which lay about him might have given some strain to his devotional instincts. The upholders of the mimic scene were quite as striking figures in the boy's memory of what in Southwark he may have seen and must have heard. He could hardly have remembered the "forenoone knell of the great bell," as the church records tell the story, when Edmund Shakspere, in 1607, was buried in St. Saviour's, and when it is fair to suppose that the dead player's brother William was among the mourners. Indeed, this church of St. Saviour's must be reckoned-if we are not too iconoclastic-among the three historic buildings, now standing, which the great dramatist may have seen. These are the Hall of the Middle Temple, where "Twelfth Night" was first acted, and where one of the benchers took me recently; Crosby Hall, mentioned by Shakspere as Crosby Place, a stately mansion of the fifteenth century, near Bishopsgate, where I remember once some of the officers of the British Museum took me to lunch in the restaurant which has been made of its fine old hall; and this Church of St. Saviour's, with its many dramatic memories, for here also are buried Fletcher and Massinger, the last called a "stranger" in the records of burial."

Then ensues an interesting account of Capt. John Smith's connection with Southwark, of some of the earliest manuscript maps of Capt. Smith and Gov. Winthrop which bear a relevance to early New England history. In conclusion, Mr. Winsor gives it as his opinion that John Harvard was not acquainted with Capt. Smith since at the time of the latter's death in 1631, Harvard was still a student at Cambridge. Smith's name had been for some time one of romantic interest, however, and there was much truth in the epitaph put above his grave-"the grim King has at last conquered one who in his time conquered many kings."