gree. He was pestered by multitudes of young ladies to write in their albums, a request he never failed to comply with. One cool

lady wrote to him, saying that she had heard a great deal of his poetry, and would like to read it; and that as she could not afford to buy a set, she wished him to give her one. The good-natured poet at once complied with the extortionate demand.

In 1841, being then seventy years old, he revisited Scotland for the first time since he had left it, sixtyfive years before. Along with Mr. Latrobe, he held a number of meetings in various towns, at which he raised above £600 for the Moravian missions. The poet was received every where with every token of respect and admiration. At Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock, and Ayr, multitudes assembled to listen to his addresses: and at Irvine, his native place, the enthusiasm of the people was irrepressible. He wrote to Sarah Gales::

I was met at the station by the provost and magistrates, and being conducted to their hall, was made a burgess of that ancient and royal burgh; and my freedom-scroll was presented with many very fine and cordial congratulations. I cannot say more than that the heart of all Irvine seemed to be moved on the occasion, and every soul in it, old and young, rich and poor, to hail me to my birthplace. My heart was almost beyond feeling by the overpowering kindness that oppressed it, and the outflowing gratitude that could scarcely find vent in words or tears.

Montgomery visited his father's chapel, and the cottage where he was born. He saw an aged woman, who told him she had many a time carried him on her back. I had no idea,' he said, at Edinburgh, 'till I came to Irvine, how great a man I was.' From Irvine the deputation proceeded to Stirling, Perth, and Edinburgh, large missionary meetings being held in each of these towns. His reception was such that it reminded him of the saying of Dr. Johnson on Lord Mansfield, that much may be made of a Scotchman if he is caught young. My case,' he said, was the reverse of this: I thought much was sometimes made of a Scotchman when he was grown old, for I never was

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so much made of till I came to Scotland.'

Mr. Robert Montgomery was now a popular preacher in Glasgow, but he did not think fit to pay a visit to his illustrious namesake while in that city. The poet went to hear him preach, but did not admire his oratory. Miss Gales asked, 'Do not the ladies of Glasgow admire his person and address ? Montgomery replied, Yes, I heard some of them praise the delicacy of his hands; but it seems none of his fair admirers can get fast hold of them.'

After Montgomery's return from Scotland, the evening of his life glided away with little incident. In 1842, he went with Mr. Latrobe on a missionary tour to Ireland, and visited his father's former abode at Grace Hill. The death of his brother Ignatius, a worthy Moravian minister, deeply affected him; and in his last years he often expressed his regret that he himself had not entered the ministry of the Brotherhood, as his parents had desired. On the death of Southey, his friends thought it probable he might be offered the laureateship; but the office was conferred on Wordsworth. After the beginning of 1843, the poet began to sink fast in health and spirits, often describing himself as

ailing, feeble, and spiritless.' He regarded it as a mile-stone marking his downward course when, in 1845, he became unable to put on his greatcoat without assistance; and though he continued to appear occasionally at religious meetings, his voice had become so weak and his mind so much enfeebled, that his appearance there was painful to his friends. 'His mind, he said in 1846, was worn down to a grindle-coke,'-the Sheffield term for a worn-out grindstone. In October of that year he fell down a long flight of stairs, and was dreadfully bruised, and sadly shaken and unnerved.' Still he was able in the following year to pay a visit to Fulneck; and in May, 1848, he presided at the anniversary meeting of the Wesleyan Missionary Society at Sheffield. In that year the Sheffield Iris became extinct. The poet continued to read with interest the periodicals and new books of the day: he wrote a hymn now and then, but even that slight

exertion affected his health. In 1849, the new edition of his Poems, in four volumes, was published by Messrs. Longman, and in 1850, the edition in one volume. Montgomery was startled, in 1851, by reading in an American newspaper, a notice of his death, with a sketch of his life and character. On the evening of July 19th, 1852, he delivered a lecture at the Music Hall, On Some Passages of English Poetry little known; but his feeble state excited the sympathy of his audience, 'all of whom were now conscious that it was the last time they should ever so meet and hear him.' In October of that year he cried many a time' over Uncle Tom's Cabin and so late as February, 1854, he listened with much interest to passages from Landor's Last Fruit off an Old Tree. He had hoped to spend Easter of that year at Fulneck, but failing strength disappointed him. On the afternoon of Saturday the 29th of April, he called on Mr. Holland, and complained of some oppression at the chest, but walked home as usual. He was fidgety' during the evening, and at family-worship handed the Bible to Sarah Gales, and asked her to read: he then knelt down, and prayed with peculiar fervour. He retired to rest at his accustomed hour, but the next morning a servant found him lying unconscious on the floor, where he must have been for several hours. Medical aid was, procured, and he recovered so far as to take a little dinner. At half-past three in the afternoon, while Miss Gales was sitting by his bedside, watching him apparently asleep, a slight change passed over his features. Montgomery was gone.

He was buried on the 11th of May, in the cemetery at Sheffield, amid such demonstrations of respect as were never paid to any individual in Sheffield before. The shops were generally closed, and the manufac tories deserted. All the official bodies of Sheffield were represented in the procession. The vicar of Sheffield and twenty-four of the clergy formed part of it. The burial service of the Church of England was read by the vicar, and at its conclusion, a hymn, written long before by the poet himself, was sung by the parish choir, and the

children of the boys' and girls' charity schools. The coffin bore the inscription-James Montgomery: died April the 30th, 1854, in the 83rd year of his age.'

We have not space to offer any thing like a satisfactory estimate of this good man's poetical genius. That he had from an early age the poetic temperament strongly deve loped, cannot be questioned; nor need we hesitate to say that no religious poet has ever surpassed him in the grace and melody of his diction, the purity, pathos, and fervour of his thought. A great charm in Montgomery's sacred poetry results from its evident sincerity: the glittering conceits with which Moore has surrounded pious themes do not ring sound when we compare them with the simple earnestness which breathes from every line of the happiest effusions of the poet of Sheffield. Not force and passion, but chaste beauty and gentle pathos, are the characteristics of what Montgomery wrote; and the piety of the man had so permeated and leavened his entire being, that without a thought or effort it coloured everything that proceeded from his pen. No short poems in the language have found a wider circulation or a more universal acceptance than Prayer and The Common Lot: and we might easily gather from The Pelican Island, and The World before the Flood, specimens of a more daring flight than are familiar to such as know Montgomery mainly as a hymnologist. We find nowhere in his four volumes that insight, passion, and reach of reflection, which distinguish the highest class of the poetry of to-day. The beautiful Lines to a Mole-hill in a Churchyard, which Montgomery amplified and spoiled in his latest edition, have always appeared to us to comprise, within a short space, the most favourable characteristics of his poetry: there is, indeed, that undue dilution of thought, which marks the composition of one who never learned to compress; but there are likewise a vein of gentle original reflection, a pathos which permeates the whole, a sympathy with all that is or was human,-all sobered somewhat by the poet's pervading sadness, and all expressed in words so

1856.]

choice, so harmonious, so naturally arranged, as prove how lightly the material trammels of verse sat upon his gentle and graceful spirit. No wonder if all who knew him loved the simple, pious, amiable, weak old man; no wonder if Sheffield was and is proud to claim him as her citizen; no wonder if the little Scotch town by the shore of the Atlantic, that

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gave him birth, and then saw him no more till he came back a man of threescore years and ten, frail, timid, and famous, makes it her proudest boast that there was born James Montgomery, and preserves in her archives, with maternal solicitude, the manuscript of The World before the Flood.

A

PERSON of cynical temper is likely to note with emphasis, and with the grim pleasure that testifies his perception of a fact his humour can assimilate and grow by, a peculiarity in the mode which poets have almost uniformly adopted in their treatment of love. These interpreters of life would by no means support the cynic in his estimate of that passion; they have, on the contrary, exhausted heaven and earth for similitudes by which to express their sense of the beauty and worth of women, of the woes of slighted and the raptures of successful lovers, of the agonies and ecstasies, the torments and the blisses, which women are capable of exciting in the hearts of men, and of the comparative poverty and worthlessness of all the delights of life weighed against one hour of the transports of requited passion, or the calm of satisfied affection. They may, moreover, be credited with a degree of sincerity in this appreciation, which it would be diflicult to accord to their tuneful raptures on many of the other emotional elements of human life. Poets are unquestionably born with fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters occasionally, and by chance aunts and uncles; but except Arma Virumque, King Lear, and Antigone, we remember no great poem which the natural affections of kindred have been among the leading motives; and, unfortunately, pius Eneas is only another name for horrid bore. Poets, too, have countries, with institutions and beliefs, unless Schiller's theory be true, which assigns them the clouds for dwelling-place and domain; but those who have tuned their harps

in

In fact,

to great national themes, to the foundation of empires, the formation of civil society, the triumphs of liberty and order, the origin of supernatural beliefs, and the growth of religious worship, belong, so far as they have been successful, to a remote past, and are the study of scholars rather than the delight of the people, while their modern imitators have made the very name of epic a bugbear to all moderately sensible and candid minds. success in the treatment of subjects disconnected with love has been most exceptional; and even the greatest poets, who have looked abroad upon human life, and have found it poetical throughout its whole extent and under every variety of circumstance, have felt the attraction of love so irresistible, that they have shot its golden threads to illumine the darkest and enliven the dullest parts of their microcosmic web, and to bring down upon the whole surface the sheen of heaven's light; while this universal passion has alone by itself sufficed to make common men poets for the moment, to raise minor poets to unwonted richness of thought and imagery, and has brightened the faces of the great masters of song. By its light, when poetry and the world were young, blind Homer read the tale of Troy; and through a vista of three thousand years, amid myriads of armed warriors, the eye still follows Briseis as she leaves with reluctant feet and reverting gaze the tent where captivity had found a solace, and the stern master was softened into the lover; still above the din of battle, above the grave turmoil of debate, we listen to the

fierce Achilles moaning for his lost mistress; the charms of Helen are more to us than the wisdom of Athene and the counsels of Nestor; and the sympathies of all but a few extremely right-minded people are throughout with the Trojans, and would be with Paris, but that he is a downright coward, and the world instinctively adopts the maxim,—

None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
Deserve the fair,

as old Sheridan used to insist upon accenting glorious John's chorus. Society and poetry with it-had degenerated between the birth of the epic full-grown and full-armed, like its own Athene, from the head of Homer, and the time when Æschylus slaughtered Persians at Salamis, and exhibited their ghosts upon the stage at Athens. The forte of the Athenian drama certainly does not lie in the representation of love. But then it must be remembered that the Attic stage was eminently the domain of stateliness and conventionality, that waxen

masks frozen into one unchanging no-expression, to which even Charles Kean can only feebly approach, would have been an inadequate instrument for rendering so eminently versatile and variable a passion as love, even reflected in the countenance of an ancient philosopher or a modern mathematician. Besides, the construction of the mouthpiece of these masks, to serve for a speaking-trumpet, could only have illustrated one rather curious scene, belonging more to comedy than tragedy-a gentleman proposing to a lady who is stonedeaf. Fancy Romeo, major humano by ten inches of cork sole, sweeping along the stage with a drawing-room train of dowager dimensions, and bawling, I would I were a glove upon that hand,' through the sort of instrument with which the captain of the Bellerophon speaks the Arrogant half a mile off. Or, still worse, Juliet sighing through the same instrument, O, Romeo! O, gentle Romeo!' and all that wondrous play of passion not once flushing up in the check or kindling in the eye. But the ugliest old hag that ever rode a broomstick

would be less repellent of the gentler emotions than an automaton Venus, made to speak through a vox humana organ pipe. In short, without insisting upon the social circumstances of Athenian women, and the peculiar notions that regulated Athenian tragedy, these mere mechanical conditions under which the tragedians wrote, are sufficient to account for the insignificant part assigned to love in their compositions, though their choruses abound in passages of the highest lyrical beauty and fervour, which indicate that the passion was still as powerful as ever to sway the feelings and excite the imagination. When the stage became again a mirror of actual contemporaneous life without disguise, as in the later comedy of Menander and his Latin imitator Terence, we find that even the mechanical obstacles beforementioned were not so insuperable but that women play an important part in these dramas, and love becomes a prominent motive and a principal attraction. Pindar unfortunately gave himself up to the turf, the prize-ring, and a curious. kind of Pagan high church hagiology, much as if the editor of Bell's Life, the author of Boxiana, and the poet of the Christian Year, were all three gentlemen in one. universal human vein shows itself, however, here and there, with a strange gleam of tenderness, in stray biographical allusions and moral reflections, interspersed with the main subject in hand, which is always to celebrate some Derby event of that old time, or to trace up the lineage of Hellenic gamechickens and White-headed Bobs to Hercules. In Theocritus, again, love is the main haunt and region' of the song, and that song about the sweetest whose echo still sounds over the waters of Time from the dim shore of ancient Hellas. Then if we come somewhat nearer to our own times, and to poets who have influenced modern literatureat least, up to a very recent period -more than their greater Hellenic brethren have done, the names of Ovid and Horace suffice to carry on the succession. Horace certainly wrote plenty of good moral sentiment and patriotism of the sort

The