Montgomery

Montgomery, JAMES, minor poet, was born at Irvine, Ayrshire, 4th November 1771, the eldest son of a Moravian pastor, and at six was sent to Fulneck (q.v.) in Yorkshire. He there spent ten dreamy years, and then was dismissed as unfit for the ministry; but meanwhile he had read by stealth many of the poets, and had tried his own hand at verse-making. After four years of various employment—with a baker at Mirfield (from this place he ran away), a general dealer at Wath, and a bookseller in London—in 1792 he became clerk to the editor of the Radical Sheffield Register. In 1794 he started a weekly paper of his own, the Sheffield Iris; and this he continued to edit till 1825. In 1795 he was fined £20, and sentenced to three months in York Castle, for striking off some copies of a 'seditious' ballad; in 1796 it was £30 and six months for describing a Sheffield riot. Yet by 1832 he had become a moderate Conservative; and in 1835 he accepted from Peel a government pension of £150. He died, unmarried, at Sheffield, 30th April 1854. His collected Poetical Works (4 vols. 1849) include The Common Lot (1805), The Wanderer of Switzerland (1806), The West Indies (1809), The World before the Flood (1813), Greenland (1819), and The Pelican Island (1827). 'Bland and deeply religious,' these poems have outlived their vogue; but ten at least of his hymns keep their place in the hymnals. His Memoirs by Holland and Everett (7 vols. 1854-56) is perhaps the worst Life in the language.