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��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
��the mother country. The Lees and the Washingtons were among the gen- try of England. The Adamses and the Quinceys, of Massachusetts, are in lin- eal descent from the old Norman fam- ily of De Quincey, whose chiefs figured as earls of Winchester in the time of Cceur de Lion. Among these and many others, that of Bartlett is worthy of no- tice. Of the highest Anglo-Norman ancestry, the members of this family held a prominent place among the old English knighthood. They were mem- bers of parliament, brave captains in the fierce feudal and Flantagenet wars, and noble cavaliers of court and castle. Chiefs of the race fought for their king at Cressy, at Poictiers, and at Agincouit. After the last-named battle Sir John Bartelot, who commanded the Sussex troops, took the castle of Fon- tenoy, in France ; for which service King Henry V. granted Sir John the castle for one of the crests of the Barte- lot " coat-of-arms." The original an- cestor of the family was Sir Adam de Bartelot, who, crossing from Normandy with William the Conqueror, participat- ed in the victory of Hastings, and re- ceived for his loyalty and heroism large landed estates in the county of Sussex, which are still in the possession of his descendants. The present head of the house is Sir Walter Bartelot, m. p. and baronet, who resides in great style at the hereditary estate of Stopham. The manor house was built in the fifteenth century, and there are timbers in it, beneath which more than seven centu- ries of ancestry have successively as- sembled. The estate consists of eight thousand acres.
Sometime during the seventeenth century two of the younger sons of the house of Bartelot emigrated to America, settling respectively at New- burvport and Amesbury, Massachusetts. The aristocratic name of Bartelot was plebeianized to that of Bartlett, and among the sturdy yeomanry of the New World the representatives of the family forgot for a time the noble lineage of their sires, but at the same time worked out a destiny more brilliant by far than
��any the brightest coronet in England could bestow. The most prominent of his race, gifted in intellect, of remarka- ble executive faculty, of stern integrity, of rare force of character, pure as an Aristides, yet possessing the penetration of a Themistocles, the associate of Hancock and Adams and Lee and Sher- man, and yet not dwarfed by their presence, one of the kingliest of New Hampshire's sons, if not the most royal of them all, was Josiah bartlett.
Dr. Bartlett was a native of Ames- bury, Mass., where he was born in No- vember, 1728. He was the fourth son of Stephen Bartlett, a man of promi- nence in that town. His early educa- tion was respectable, but he was denied the advantages of a collegiate course. When he was sixteen years old he began the study of medicine under the superintendence of Dr. Nehemiah Ordway, of Amesbury. He continued his studies for five years, at the end of which time he commenced the practice of his profession at Kingston. This was in the year 1 749.
Kingston, though a small village, was then one of the important boroughs of New Hampshire. Distant only seven miles from Exeter, and not much far- ther from Portsmouth, Kingston shone with the reflected light from those places. Social life was active. The wearing apparel of the fashionable peo- ple of the village was copied from the aristocracy at the vice regal court of the Wentworths. Men wore knee breeches and hose, broad-skirted coats lined with buckram, long waist-coats, wide cuffs lined with lace, three-cor- nered hats and swords. Women's dresses were made of heavy silks and satins, called brocades, on which raised figures of leaves and flowers were wov- en, or worked in colored silk or thread of silver and gold. Of course, the dress of the common folk was much less elegant, being designed more for service than beauty.
It was the reign of wigs. Gentle- man and plebeian wore them alike. The portraits of Lord Pepperell and of the Wentworths show those worthies
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