comparative retirement, during which the physical difficulties he had been laboring under from youth gradually cumulated, and his power of resistance diminished. He died on the 26th of June, 1796, his last words being an expression of gratitude to a friend for some slight attention, and of confidence in the future — “You make the way to God easier.”
There is a bust of him from life by Ceracchi, and a portrait by Peale. Dr. Benjamin Rush read a eulogy before the American Philosophical Society, in the presence of the President and Congress of the United States, the Legislature of Pennsylvania, foreign ministers, judges, and men of learning of the time. One of the city squares bears his name. His home on Arch street was long known as “Fort Rittenhouse,” because, pending a dispute as to jurisdiction between Pennsylvania and the United States in 1809, it was guarded for three weeks by State militia, to prevent the service of a mandamus issued by the Federal courts.
Though he had never received any regular training, his attainments were extensive. In addition to the classics he mastered the French, German, and Dutch languages. From the German he translated the drama of Lucia Sampson, published by Charles Cist, and the Idyls of Gesner, and in the Columbian Magazine for February, 1787, is a copper-plate print of the Ohio Pyle Falls from one of his sketches. A man of culture said he was never in his presence without learning something. He elicited the admiration of all the great men of his day, unless it be John Adams, who could find no remarkable depth in his face, called him an anchorite, and sought perhaps to disparage his reputation by alluding sharply to Philadelphia as “the heart, the censorium, the pineal gland of the United States.” In person he was tall and slender, and
