JOHN BARTLETT. 841 



of more enlightened opinions or more desirous of using his opportunities 

 of diffusing them." 



These activities were interrupted by many years of ill health, but 

 their burden was lightened by the care and sympathy which a perfectly 

 happy marriage had brought ; and when, during the last half dozen years 

 of his life, his strength returned, and there was a renewal of energy, 

 his diligence in furthering what had now become his chief interest 

 seemed to increase quite to the end. Happily the anxieties which had 

 so long haunted him, suddenly, after a long period of depression, finally 

 passed away. The clouds that had darkened his sky seemed to vanish. 

 He became in his old age light-hearted and almost gay, more animated 

 and conversable than he had ever been, and even more active than 

 ever in the furthering of all good enterprises, both his own and other 

 people's. His last years seemed plainly the happiest and most serene 

 of them all. 



It is sufficiently apparent, even from this record, that here was a man 

 who strove sedulously and successfully to make the most and the best 

 of himself and of his opportunities, and to do the best and most that 

 was in his power, not only for his immediate friends, but for mankind. 

 It is well that the example of so good a man and so good a citizen 

 should not go unrecorded. 



JOHN BARTLETT. 



John Bartlett was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1892, when 

 he was seventy-two years of age. His election was the well-deserved 

 recognition by this body of a remarkable career, probably unique in our 

 annals and likely to remain unique. It was the career of one who was 

 not a trained scholar in any of the sections among which our membership 

 is divided, nor a practitioner in any of the learned professions, but a 

 man who in the course of an active and successful mercantile life of 

 fifty-two years found time to devote to literature in every one of them, 

 who was a collector of books with which he enriched a great library, 

 and who produced literary studies that should make scholars and laymen 

 of every English-speaking country grateful when they hear his name. 



He was born in Plymouth, June 14, 1820, and came of ancestors of 

 the oldest New England stock on both sides of the house. He was 

 eighth in descent from that Robert Bartlett who, arriving at Plymouth 

 in 1623, married Mary (the daughter of Richard Warren, Mayflower, 

 1G20), whose eldest son, Benjamin, married a granddaughter of Elder 



