search of a publisher. Harrison received Montgomery kindly, gave him a situation in his shop, but declined to publish the volume upon which all his hopes of immortality depended. Disappointed in finding a customer for his verse, he resolved to try his hand at prose, and soon produced a tale for children. He offered it to Marshall, who respectfully declined the purchase. He then wrote a novel in imitation of Fielding. It was returned to him with the grave remark: "You swear so shockingly, that I dare not publish the work as it is!" Montgomery was thunderstruck; for he had never uttered an oath in his life. Thoughtlessly imitating the style of his model, he had made the heroes of his tale indulge in this awful profanity. The lesson was valuable, and the vicious indiscretion was cured for ever. Defeated in every attempt to find a publisher, he returned to Wath, "a sadder and," no doubt, 66 a wiser man." All his dreams of ambition had been dispersed "As chaff before the whirlwind flies," and he prepared to do his best in measuring calico, grinding coffee, and weighing soap. He was now in his twenty-first year; slender and delicate. Like "the sweet Psalmist of Israel," whose inspired songs he "did into English" metre, he was also " ruddy, and of a fair countenance." He was grave in disposition and correct in deportment, with an air of mysteriousness about him which led the villagers. to regard him as "no vulgar boy." It seems, too, that he was not altogether unmoved by the tender passion. The sweet and gentle Hannah had about her an indefinable witchery, against which his young heart was by no means proof. She, however, slipt through his fingers; and on her marriage he ventured to disclose his passion in a composition, half serious and half playful, but very simple and tender. I will quote a part of it: I reached the hamlet-all was gay; I love a rustic holyday; I met a wedding,-stepped aside; It passed, my HANNAH was the bride. There was a Nancy Wainwright, too," one of the Wath beauties," who sorely troubled the young Poct at his public devotions. While at Church, his eyes were sometimes more deeply engaged scanning Nancy's pretty face, than his ears were "attent" to the Parson's grave discourse. Had he continued in this "Queen of villages," girded with his apron-strings behind the counter, some one of these "rustic beauties" would probably have entwined him in her silken cords, led him captive at her will, and saved him from the long solitariness of his extended bachelor life. V. While on his round one day, collecting accounts in a village near Barnsley, he saw an advertisement in the Sheffield Register, announcing that a clerk was wanted in a counting-house in that town. He wrote a letter of application, which he concluded with a tremendous burst of loyalty by writing, in a large flourishing hand, "GOD SAVE THE KING." His application was successful, and on the second of April, 1792, he entered Sheffield, which one of his old school-fellows had described, as “an ugly town in a great black hole, where forty gentlemen were building a very large public-house."* Here, in the shop of Mr. Gales, "printer, bookseller, and auctioneer," situated in the "Hartshead," which Tom Moore describes as 66 one of the closest and dirtiest alleys in all dirty Sheffield," our young aspirant after fame commenced his duties as book-keeper. At this period, and for a few following years, the country was a scene of terrible political excitement. The *The Tontine Inn, built in 1793; but taken down a few years ago, and the site covered with the present New Market Hall. French Revolution had convulsed the continent of Europe, and the advancing wave of its pestilential influence had broken upon our own shores. The friends of monarchy and of constitutional government regarded the continental movement with alarm and detestation; while the manufacturers of new constitutions, the lovers of abstract rights, and the political demagogues in want of a situation, of whom there are always more than enough, hailed it as the earnest of the "regeneration" of society, and the dawn of a social millennium. Disaffection waved her magic wand, and forthwith political societies started into existence; "monster meetings" were held; pamphlets, subversive of the principles of loyalty, were scattered broad-cast over the land; the war against France was denounced as a war against liberty and the rights of man; and English reverses, whenever they happened, were rejoiced over as a glorious triumph of democratic principles. On the other hand, the Government, backed by the aristocracy and a large proportion of the people, instituted severe prosecutions, and took terrible reprisals. Sheffield was one of the great centres of this burning excitement; and the two parties arrayed themselves against each other with untold bitterness and spite. Just at this niche of time, and in the very "height of this great argument," Montgomery entered the town, and was thrown into the thickest of the fight. His master was a leading democrat, and the paper which he edited and published was the recognised organ of revolutionary principles. Young and inexperienced, "having no more knowledge of the world than a child of seven years," and with poetic sympathies excited by the ideal of liberty, which the theories of the day placed before him, he was irresistibly drawn into the whirlpool. He never figured as a demagogue on the platform, nor as a plotting committee-man, nor even as a member of any one of the political clubs. But one step he did take. The twenty-eighth of February, 1794, was appointed by the Government as a general Fast; and the "Friends of Peace and Reform," as Gales and his party loved to call themselves, resolved to observe the day after their own fashion, by holding a large open-air meeting. An immense crowd assembled on the spot where Carver-street Chapel now stands; prayer was delivered by Billy Broomhead;" a "serious lecture," composed by "Neddy Oakes," who afterwards became a Methodist preacher, was read; and then a "hymn, written by one Montgomery," was "sung in full chorus" by the assembled crowd of six or eight thousand people. As this was the first of his compositions ever brought into public notice, I will give it entire. O God of Hosts, thine ear incline, Regard our prayers-our cause be Thine; Now red and terrible, Thine hand a |