life and writings, from which, and some other materials, we prepare this brief biography.

JAMES MONTGOMERY is the eldest son of a Moravian clergyman, and was born at Irvine, in Scotland, on the fourth of November, 1771. His parents determined to educate him for the ministry, and at a very early age placed him in one of the seminaries of their church, where he remained ten years. At the end of this period he decided not to study the profession to which he had been destined, and was, in consequence, placed with a shop-keeper in Yorkshire. Ill satisfied with his new employment, however, he abandoned it after a few months, and, when but sixteen years of age, made his first appearance in London, with a manuscript volume of poems, of which he vainly endeavoured to procure the publication.

In 1792, being then about twenty-one years of age, he went to Sheffield, where he was soon after engaged as a writer for The Register, a weekly gazette, published by a Mr. GALES; and, in 1794, on the flight of his employer from England, to avoid a political prosecution, he himself became publisher and editor, and changing the name of the paper to The Iris, conducted it, with much taste, ability, and moderation. It was still, however, obnoxious to the government, and Mr. MONTGOMERY was prosecuted for printing in it a song commemorative of the destruction of the Bastile, fined twenty pounds, and imprisoned three months in York Castle. On resuming his editorial duties, he carefully avoided partisan politics, but after a short period he

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was arrested for an offensive passage in an account which he gave of a riot in Sheffield, and again imprisoned.

It was during his second confinement that he wrote "Prison Amusements," which appeared in 1797. In the preface to the first edition, he says, "These pieces were composed in bitter moments, amid the horrors of a jail, under the pressure of sickness. They were the transcripts of melancholy feelings,-the warm effusions of a bleeding heart. The writer amused his imagination with attiring his sorrows in verse, that, under the romantic appearance of fiction, he might sometimes forget that his misfortunes were real."

Mr. MONTGOMERY returned to his office, and with a strong determination, "come wind or sun, come fire or water, to do what was right," conducted his paper; and his taste, judgment and integrity gradually overcame the prejudices which the course of his predecessor, much more than any thing he had himself written, had created against it.

Referring to this period of his life, he tells us that he had "foolishly sacrificed all his friends, connections, and prospects in life, and thrown himself headlong into the world, with the sole view of acquiring poetic laurels." "In the retirement of Fulneck, among the Moravian Brethren, by whom I had been educated," he continues, "I was nearly as ignorant of the world. and its every-day concerns, as the gold fishes swimming about in the glass globe on the pedestal before us are of what we are doing around them; and when I took

the rash step of running into the vortex, I was nearly as little prepared for the business of general life as they would be to take a part in our proceedings, were they to leap out of their element.......The experience of something more than two years had awakened me to the unpoetical realities around me, and I was left to struggle alone amidst the crowd, without any of those inspiring motives left to cheer me, under the delusive influence of which I had flung myself amidst scenes, and into society, for which I was wholly unfit by feeling, taste, habit, or bodily constitution. Thus, I came to Sheffield, with all my hopes blighted like the leaves and blossoms of a premature spring.......There was yet life, but it was perverse, unnatural life, in my mind; and the renown which I found to be unattainable, at that time, by legitimate poetry, I resolved to secure by such means as made many of my contemporaries notorious. I wrote verses in the doggerel strain of Peter Pindar, and prose sometimes in imitation of Fielding and Smollett, and occasionally in the strange style of the German plays and romances then in vogue. Effort after effort failed. A Providence of disappointment shut every door in my face, by which I attempted to force my way to a dishonourable fame. I was thus happily saved from appearing as the author of works which, at this hour, I should have been ashamed to acknowledge. Disheartened at length with il success, I gave myself up to indolence and apathy, and lost seven years of that part of my youth which ought to have been the most active

and profitable, in alternate listlessness and despondency, using no further exertion in my office affairs than was necessary to keep up my credit under heavy pecuniary obligations, and gradually, though slowly, to liquidate them."

About the year 1803 he began to write in his better vein of seriousness, and a lyric which he published, under a nom de plume in The Iris, received such unexpected applauses, that he from that period abjured his former eccentricities. One lay after another, in the "reformed spirit," appeared in the two following years, and he collected the series into a volume, which was printed under the title of "The Ocean, and other Poems," in 1805.

In 1798, the independence of Switzerland had been virtually destroyed by France, though till 1803 the cantons were nominally allowed to exercise home jurisdiction. In the beginning of the last mentioned year NAPOLEON abolished the government, and declared that the cantons must in future be the open frontier of France. On the seventeenth of February this circumstance was thus recorded by Mr. MONTGOMERY, in The Iris:

"The heart of Switzerland is broken; and Liberty has been driven from the only sanctuary which she had found on the Continent. But the unconquered, the unconquerable offspring of Tell, disdaining to die slaves in the land where they were born free, are emigrating to America. There, in some region remote and romantic, where Solitude has never seen the face of man, nor Silence been startled by his voice, since the hour

of creation, may the illustrious exiles find another Switzerland, another country rendered dear to them by the presence of Liberty. But even there, amidst mountains more awful, and forests more sombre than his own, when the echoes of the wilderness shall be awakened by the enchantment of that song which no Swiss in a foreign clime ever hears without fondly recalling the land of his nativity, and weeping with affection, how will the heart of the exile be wrung with home-sickness! and oh! what a sickness of heart must that be, which arises, not from 'hope deferred,' but from 'hope extinguished,-yet remembered.""

A friend, on reading this paragraph, suggested to the author that it was a fine subject for a poem; and with the intention of composing a ballad in the style and of the length of the well-known fragmentary cento of "The Friar of Orders Gray," he immediately commenced what grew under his hands to be "The Wanderer of Switzerland." In the year after its publication, when it had reached a third edition, it was violently attacked in one of those smart but shallow criticisms which gave notoriety to the earlier numbers of the Edinburgh Review. It was still, however, successful; and twenty-eight years afterward the Review confesses, against its prophecy, that our poet has taken a place among the classics of the British nation.

His next work was "The West Indies," which appeared in 1809, and was designed as a memorial of the then recent abolition by the British government of the Slave Trade.