MONTGOMERY, JAMES, a minor British poet, the son of a Moravian preacher, was born at Irvine, Ayrshire, Nov. 4, 1771, and at the age of seven was sent to the Mora vian settlement at Fulneck, near Leeds, in order to complete his education for the Moravian pastorate. At Fulneck the course of study seems to have been too severe in its character for the young poet; the imaginative side of his mind was allowed no recog nition and it was only by stealth that he read Cowper's poems and Robinson Orusoa. Much of his leisure time at school was employed in the composition of verses and of music, in which he took much delight. In 1789 he ran away, and after four years of various employment, became engaged as clerk to Mr. Gales, editor of The Sheffield Regis ter, for which lie soon began to write political articles. In 1794 he commenced a news paper of his own, The Sheffield Iris, which he continued to edit till 1825, when lie retired. Ditrino. the period of his editorship Montgomery was twice subjected to fine and impris onmenq by government. In 1795 he was fined £20, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment, for printing off some copies of a miserable ballad in which government suspected that sedition lurked, and in 1796 he was fined £30, and imprisoned for six months, for giving an account of a Sheffield riot. He received a government pension
of £150 in 1835, and he died at his own house in Sheffield, April 30, 1854. His prin cipal works are: the Wanderer of Switzerland (1806); The West Indies (1809); The World before the Flood (1812); and The Pelican Island, and other Poems (1827). A collected edition of his minor poems appeared in 1851; and in 1853 his Original Hymns for Publia. Private, and Social Devotion closed the series of his publications.
His poems are melodious, full of picturesque description, and the gentlest human feeling. The personages introduced in his poems are, however, only shadows, or touched with the faintest color of character. But he claims a well-defined position among the favorite poets of his country by several of his hymns and minor poems, and by his exquisite verses on Home, which commences the third part of The West Indies.