GORTON, SAMUEL (1592-1677), colonial fighter for re ligious and civil liberty, was born in Gorton, England, in 1592. For a time a clothier in London, he sailed for Boston, Mass., "to enjoy liberty of conscience." Failing to find it there and being in volved in religious, political and property disputes at Plymouth, Aquidneck, Providence and Shawomet successively, he went to England, where he published in 1646 Simplicities Defence against Seven Headed Policie (reprinted in the R. I. Hist. Soc. Collections, vol. ii.), giving an account of his grievances against the Massa chusetts Government. He returned to Shawomet in 1648 with a letter from the earl of Warwick, after whom he renamed the settle ment, and lived there in peace and honour until his death on or before Dec. io, 1677. He left several religious treatises, both in print and manuscript, some of them surprisingly modern in con cept in spite of their quaint phraseology. As a result estimates of him have shifted from his contemporaries' denunciations as "a most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties" and "a man whose spirit was stark drunk with blasphemies and insolences," to his later biographers' tributes as "a forgotten founder of our liber ties," "the premature John the Baptist of New England Transcen dentalism." Edward Winslow's attack on Gorton, Hypocrisie Unmasked (1646) was issued by the Club for Colonial Reprints (Providence, i916). Among his biographers are J. M. Mackie in J. Sparks's, Library of American Biography (end ser., vol. v., 1845) ; L. G. Janes (1896), and Adelos Gorton (1907).