Joseph Bartlett


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The Poets of Maine
A Collection of Specimen Poems from over Four Hundred Verse-Makers of the Pine Tree State.
with 
Biographical Sketches
Compiled by George Bancroft Griffith
Portland, Maine
Elwell, Pickard & Company
Transcript Job Print; Edward Small, Binder.
Copyright by Elwell, Pickard & Co.
1888
page 10


Joseph Bartlett.

Born June 10, 1762, in Plymouth, Mass., and graduated at Harvard in 1782.  He was a very
eccentric man, and one of the wits of the bar.  His scholarship was such as to entitle him 
to membership in the highest literary society of the college, -- the Phi Beta Kappa.  He 
came to Saco in 1803, and was elected to the Senate of Massachusetts in 1805.  Bartlett was 
the man who brought an action against Nathaniel Willis of the Eastern Argus for libel, 
and imprisoned him and recovered damages.  He left Maine about 1810, and lived afterwards 
on his desultory literary labors.  On the 4th of July, 1823, he delivered an oration in the 
hall of the Exchange Office House, Boston, and recited an ode, mentioned by Mr. Loring in 
his "Hundred Boston Orators."  The same year he published an edition of poems dedicated to 
John Quincy Adams, to which he appended "Aphorisms of Men, Principles and Things."  While 
living in Saco he edited a paper called the Freeman's Friend, and on the 4th of July, 1805, 
delivered an oration at Biddeford.  In 1827, at the age of 65, he wrote the following 
epitaph upon himself:

"Tis done! the fatal stroke is given,
And Bartlett's fled to hell or heaven;
His friends approve it, and his foes applaud,
Yet he will have the verdict of his God."