Joseph Bartlett (1762–1827), attorney, public official, and author, was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1782 and then spent several tumultuous years in London, where he reportedly disrupted a theatrical production, went to debtors’ prison, had his own play produced, and worked as an actor. Bartlett returned to the United States in 1786 and studied law in Boston. He established a practice about 1788 in Woburn, Massachusetts. Increasingly notorious for his eccentricities, Bartlett painted his house black and called it “the Coffin.” Sometime around 1797 he moved to Cambridge, where he continued to practice law and served in the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature, 1799–1802. Bartlett caused a stir at Harvard in 1799 with his delivery of a satirical address in celebration of Phi Beta Kappa’s anniversary entitled Physiognomy, A Poem. He identified himself as a Republican when he asked TJ for preferment in 1802. Bartlett moved again in around 1803 to Saco, York County, District of Maine, and two years later he represented that county in the Massachusetts state senate. He ran for the United States House of Representatives in 1806 and became embroiled in a libel suit against Nathaniel Willis, of the Portland Argus. Bartlett won the lawsuit but lost the election and was forced out of Saco. In 1810 he published a book of Aphorisms on Men, Manners, Principles & Things in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bartlett eventually settled in Boston, where he died (ANB; William Willis, A History of the Law, the Courts, and the Lawyers Of Maine [1863], 438–44; Harvard Catalogue, 173; A Catalogue of the Fraternity of ΦΒΚ, Alpha of Massachusetts [1836], 5; PTJ, 38:610–3; Frederick Gardiner Fassett Jr., A History of Newspapers in the District of Maine, 1785–1820 [1932], 123–39; Boston Commercial Gazette, 25 Oct. 1827).

days of my youth … banish’d is the opening stanza of a “Song” that Laura Sophia Temple published in her Poems (London, 1805), 172.