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  me of his play before.’ A note in the key to the ‘Rehearsal’ says: ‘Mr. William Wintershull was a most excellent, judicious actor, and the best instructor of others.’ Davies chronicles that he was the first King in ‘King Henry IV’ after the Restoration, and says that he was so celebrated for the part of Cokes in Ben Jonson's ‘Bartholomew Fair’ that the public preferred him even to Nokes in the character. Dennis praises his Slender. Wintersel was held equally good in tragedy and comedy. Pepys, under date 28 April 1668, saw ‘Love in a Maze’ (the ‘Changes’), and declares ‘very good mirth of Lacy the clown, and Wintersell the country knight, his master.’



WINTERTON, RALPH (1600–1636), physician, son of Francis Winterton, was born at Lutterworth, Leicestershire, in 1600. He was sent to Eton, and on 3 June 1617 was elected scholar of King's College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow on 3 June 1620. He matriculated in the university on 5 July 1617, graduated B.A. 1620, M.A. 1624. He suffered from sleeplessness and melancholia, and consulted the regius professor of physic, Dr. John Collins, who advised him to give up mathematics, at which he was then working, and to study medicine, and assured him he might thus erase from his mind the recollection of past ills. ‘I did,’ says Winterton, ‘as he advised, and what he foretold took place’ (Preface to Aphorisms). In 1625 he was a candidate for the professorship of Greek, when Robert Creighton [q. v.], who had for some time been deputy, was elected. He petitioned the visitor of King's College in May 1629, and on 20 Aug. was accordingly formally diverted to the study of physic, which he had already pursued for more than four years. He received the university license to practise medicine in 1631, and on 16 Sept. in that year petitioned King's College to grant him the degree of M.D. under its statutes. His request was refused, but was urged by [q. v.], writing from Buckden on 25 Jan. 1632, on behalf of the bishop of Lincoln, and by Bishop (1582–1650) [q. v.] himself on 28 June 1632, as well as by the Earl of Holland on 28 Nov. 1633, but all without effect. Some conduct in hall on 15 Dec. 1631 and on 7 Aug. 1633 which may perhaps have been of the nature of acrid theological discussion seems to have been the ground for these refusals. A letter in which, on 12 Dec. 1633, W. Bray writes by Archbishop Laud's direction to Samuel Collins, provost of King's, signifies to the provost ‘not his grace's pleasure but his desire that the provost would speedily and without any wayes of delay grant to Mr. Winterton his degree in the house.’ It was granted within a fortnight.

In 1627 Winterton translated John Gerhard's ‘Meditations,’ in which he was encouraged by John Bowle, afterwards bishop of Rochester, and they were printed at Cambridge in 1631, and reached a fifth edition in 1638. His brother Francis was one of six hundred volunteers, commanded by the Marquis of Hamilton, who went to serve under Gustavus Adolphus, and his death at Castrin in Silesia in 1631 depressed Winterton so much that he sought relief by translating the ‘Considerations of Drexelius upon Eternitie,’ which was published at the Cambridge University press in 1636, and of which subsequent editions appeared in 1650 and 1658, 1675, 1684, 1703, 1705, and 1716. In 1632 he also translated and printed at Cambridge ‘A Golden Chaine of Divine Aphorismes’ of John Gerhard of Heidelberg. It contains commendatory verses in English by Edward Benlowes of St. John's College, and by four fellows of his own college, Dore Williamson, Robert Newman, Henry Whiston, and Thomas Page. In 1633 he published at Cambridge an edition of Terence, and an edition of the Greek poem of Dionysius ‘De Situ Orbis,’ with a dedication in Greek verse to Sir [q. v.], provost of Eton. He had written a Greek metrical version of the first books of the aphorisms of Hippocrates in 1631, and early in 1633 published at Cambridge, with a dedication to William Laud, then bishop of London, ‘Hippocratis Magni Aphorismi Soluti et Metrici.’ Each aphorism is given in the original with the Latin version of John Heurnius of Utrecht, and is rendered into Latin verse and Greek verse. The Latin verses are by (d. 1563) [q. v.], president of the College of Physicians in 1549, whose name appears on the title-page (Epigrammata, p. 38). The seven books of aphorisms are followed by epigrams in Latin or Greek in praise of Winterton's work by the regius professors of medicine at Cambridge and Oxford; by the president and seventeen fellows of the College of Physicians, of whom fourteen are Cantabrigians and three Oxonians; by [q. v.], afterwards professor of physic; by members of every