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Friends. His ancestors had been manufacturers at Carlisle, but shortly before his birth his father removed to London, where Bernard was born, January 31st, 1784. He was educated in a Quaker school at Ipswich. At the age of fourteen he was appren ticed to Mr. Samuel Jesup, a shopkeeper at Halstead, in Essex, where he remained eight years. In 1806 he went to Wood- bridge, Suifoik, and a year after married Lucy Jesup, the niece of his former master, and entered into partnership with her brother as a coal and corn merchant. But his happy married life was cut short by death, a year after he had entered upon it, and he left Woodbridge and became private tutor in a family at Liverpool. After a year at Liverpool, he returned in 1810 to Woodbridge, and became a clerk in Messrs. Alexander s bank, where he continued for about forty years, till his death. He did not marry again, but found a life companion in his only daughter Lucy, who edited his " Poems and Letters, with a Memoir," in the year of his death, 1849.
Some idea of Mr. Barton s life may be formed from what he says in a letter, dated " 11 mo. 16, 1843." Some of his words are these: "I took my seat on the identical stool I now occupy at the desk, to the wood of which I have now well-nigh grown, in the third month of the year 1810 ; and there I have sat on for three-and-thirty years, beside the odd eight months, without one month s respite in all that time. I often wonder that my health has stood this sedentary probation as it has, and that my mental faculties have survived three-and-thirty years of putting down figures in three rows, casting them up, and carrying them forward, ad injinitum. Nor is this all for during that time, I think, I have put forth some half-dozen volumes of verse ; to say nothing of scores and scores of odd bits of verse contributed to annuals, periodicals, albums, and what not ; and a correspondence implying a hundred times the writing of all these put together." His life had two different elements, the daily routine, and the evenings, too often prolonged into the night, devoted to poetical efforts,
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