John Morton possessed a disposition at once lively, sociable, friendly and humane. Overpowering the deficiencies of early education, by the strength of his mind, and the force of his talents, he rose to the highest and most dignified offices of the state. Casting aside the chain and the quadrant of the surveyor, he measured his mind with the first men of the age, in the wide, but unsurveyed, field of rational freedom, and was one among the first to regulate its angles according to the two principles of practical political geometry. It would have been in vain to seek the plough-boy of Ridley, in the dignified judge upon the bench, in the speaker of the legislative assembly of Pennsylvania, or in the important member of the most august body of assembled virtue and patriotism, that the world has ever been taught to venerate. He was charitable to the poor; a kind friend, an affectionate husband and father; a social, and oftentimes jocular companion. His modesty was equal to his merit; and the remark might justly be applied to him in the language of the poet, that,

"It is the witness still of excellency,

To put a strange face on his own perfection."

Eminently beloved by his neighbours, their confidence in him was perfect and unshaken; and a long list of his services, as executor and guardian, shows, that the dying parent could often meet, with more consolation, the stroke of death, under the conviction that the property of his children, and the regulation of their conduct, had been committed to the charge of an honest man.

He entered into matrimony with Miss Ann Justis, of the state of Delaware: they were blessed with a numerous offspring, eight of whom, three sons and five daughters, were living at the time of their father's decease.

In the month of April, 1777, a violent inflammatory fever removed him from this mortal scene, in the fifty-fourth year of his age he was buried in the cemetery of St. James's church, in Chester, of which he was a member. At the close of his life, he was abandoned by some who had been his warmest friends, but whose political sentiments differed from his own, and they could neither forgive nor forget the vote which he had given in favour of independence. It was then that the patriot shone forth even amid the pangs of dissolution: "Tell them," said he, on his death-bed, and with a prophetic spirit, "tell them that they will live to see the hour, when they shall acknowledge it to have been the most glorious service that I ever rendered to my country."

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