Have friendly met together;
Thou art the soul of minstrelsy
In every kind of weather.
Through all life’s journey thou hast not
From me an hour departed;
Thou never hast my track forgot,
Which proves thee most true hearted.
I have two letters from Mr. Bartlett to my grandfather, William Davis, soliciting aid, and one to my grandfather from President Kirkland of Harvard University, inclosing thirteen dollars contributed by a few Cambridge gentlemen with the request that he would use it for Mr. Bartlett’s benefit. He married Anna May, daughter of Thomas Witherell of Plymouth, and died in Boston, October 21, 1827.
Of Perez Morton, a Plymouth man, and one of the most distinguished members of the Massachusetts bar in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the first half of the nineteenth, probably few of my Plymouth readers have ever heard. He was son of Joseph and Amiah (Bullock) Morton of Plymouth, and was born October 22, 1750. He graduated at Harvard in 1771, and was recommended to be sworn as attorney in 1774. In 1786 he was made a Barrister, and on the 7th of September, 1810, he was appointed Attorney General. At the time of the appointment of Mr. Morton as Attorney General, the office of Solicitor General was occupied by Daniel Davis, who had been appointed January 20, 1802, under an act passed March 4, 1800, reviving the office which had been discontinued for a time after the revolution. In 1821 it having been the general feeling for some time that the two offices were unnecessary, the legislature, while unwilling on account of the respect entertained for their incumbents, to abolish either, passed an act providing “that whenever the office of Attorney General or Solicitor General shall become vacant by death, resignation or otherwise, the salary annexed to the office, which shall first so become vacant as aforesaid, shall thenceforth cease and determine.” As neither death nor resignation occurred, an act was passed March 14, 1832, to take effect June 1, abolishing both offices and establishing the office of Attorney General for the Commonwealth. On the 31st of May, therefore, 1832, Mr. Morton went out of office, and James T. Austin was appointed under the new law, Attorney General of the Commonwealth. Sarah Morton, the wife of Perez, was an authoress of some repute. She wrote a book entitled, “The power of Sympathy,” a copy of which is in the library of the Pilgrim Society, which is claimed to have been the first American novel. Mr. Morton died in Boston, October 14, 1837.
I cannot pass by Court Square without a notice of Mrs. Nicolson’s boarding house, which stood many years on the north side of the Square. Thomas Nicholson, son of James, came into possession of the house after the death of his father in 1772. He married for a second wife about 1790, Hannah, daughter of John Otis, and sister of Mrs. Grace Heyman Goddard, already noticed as the mother of Mrs. Abraham Jackson. Thomas Nicolson was a shipmaster, and I believe was for some time before his death in the United States Revenue Service, and died on the island of Gaudaloupe, February 9, 1798.