Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

MoXiUti
Another item of interest in this Will and the Inventory connected
with it, is the following
:
" Item—all such books as I shall die possessed of, which shall have the following
latin words wrote in them with my own hand-writing, viz :
' usque quo, Domine,' I
give and devise unto my said son-in-law Mr. Stephen Johnson, to use and improve
during his natural life, and at his death I give and devise the same to my grandson
Diodate Johnson, to be at his dispose for ever."
Seventy-six volumes, mostly theological works, were thus bequeathed,
valued at ;!{^2o. 6. 7.—certainly, in themselves, a remarkable collection of
books for that time, fitted to awaken curiosity respecting its possible
origin ;
and this the more when one notices, by the Inventory, that among
these volumes were " Mr. Diodate's annotation," and " Le Mercier's
History of Geneva."* Could it be, one might ask, that the author of
those "Annotations," a celebrated divine of Geneva, of the time of the
Reformation, was related to our New Haven testator of the same name?
and did William Diodate, one might farther inquire, make an heirloom of
his library, as the words of his Will imply, not only on account of its
being so large for a hundred and forty years ago, but also on account of
family-associations connected with it, perhaps as having come down to
himself, in part at least, from that learned divine ? Was the sentiment of
the motto, moreover, which he wrote in each volume, an inheritance of
the spirit of ancestors who had, with "long patience," struggled for
freedom of faith in times of conflict and peril ? An affirmative answer to
the first of these inquiries, which suggested itself, indeed, several years
since, to one of the authors of this monograph, who is a descendant
of William Diodate, but which we are now able to give on satisfactory
grounds, almost inevitably leads to the same reply to all of them.
* Rev. Andrew Le Mercier came to this country in 1715, and was made the Pastor of a French Protes-
tant church in Boston. " In 1732 he published a minute and interesting history of the Geneva Church,
in five books, l2mo., 200 pages ; also, in the ' same volume, A Geographical and Political Account of
the Republick of Geneva,' 76 pages "—The New Engl. Hist, and Geneal. Register. . . . Boston,
1859, xiii. 315-24.
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