the subject of a second. And I will content myself with saying, as a closing remark, that this review will detect a principle of steady advance in the purification and elevation of war-such as must offer hope to those who believe in the possibility of its absolute extermination, and must offer consolation to those who (like myself) deny it.

ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POETRY.

A hundred philosophical critics have given us their definitions of poetry, but after all it may be truly said to be a thing not to be de fined but to be felt. Let the whole mass of existing definitions be collected together and subjected to consideration by any one who has the feeling of poetry about him, and he will be obliged to throw aside the one half of them as unmeaning nonsense, and the other half as only partially meeting the case, or else embracing much more than they ought to do, as either obviously too narrow, or obviously too wide. In accordance with the general mass of definitions, it would be our duty to pronounce the greater part of the Iliad destitute of poetry. All of us have wasted more or less precious time in perusing something of the controversy on the question "Was Pope a poet?" Of poets in our own day, some have discovered that Sir Walter Scott is not a poet; that Macaulay also is not one, and that Lord Byron is only one of the second class. These criticisms happily do not give much trouble to people of sound heads and sound hearts, any more than the notions of those original thinkers who tell us that Sheridan was no great wit, that Hogarth was not a painter, and that Napoleon knew nothing about the art of war. It is only amongst people whom the feeling of poetry cannot touch, that there is a passion for reading or writing definitions of what poetry is to those who feel it and love it, such disquisitions are especially tedious and uninteresting-as they are to all unfruitful. The lover of poetry knows it whenever and wherever he meets with it, and knows all its numerous counterfeits. He points his finger to the real article wherever it is present, and no more wishes to have his feelings of delight and pleasure analysed for him by a twaddling metaphysician, than he would give up the use of his natural eyesight, and contemplate the skin of beauty through the magnifying glass of the optician. To deal scientifically with poetry is what no friend to poetry will venture upon. To prove by argument that a poem is really poetical is the way to make really poetical people lose all taste for it.

The Rev. Robert Montgomery, popularly known as Satan Montgomery, a title derived from his most notorious production, and applied to him in order to distinguish him from a poet of merit and modesty, has for a long time been before the public in the two rather disrespectable capacities of a popular ladies' preacher and a volumnious and am

bitious poct. We have, for the sake of simplicity of division, divided Mr. Montgomery into Mr. Montgomery the preacher and Mr. Montgomery the poet, of course using the term poet conventionally and for convenience' sake, and we feel satisfied that our view of him in this twofold capacity, is a perfectly complete view of Mr. Montgomery. We have certainly, we must state, dipped into productions of his, which, for convenience' sake and speaking conventionally, as we did when we spoke of his poetry, must be declared to belong to the class of prose writings. But both those who allow and those who disallow the title of poetry to those works of Mr. Montgomery, which are printed in lines of unequal length, will deal in the same way with those other works of his, in which, by looking at the performance of the printer, the reader is admonished that the thing before him is what is called prose. The great Bacon is referred to as an example, amongst several, of one who could be poetical in prose, but lost the cunning of the poet, when he betook himself to verse. Mr. Montgomery is no such one-sided genius. It will be allowed both by his admirers and his despisers, that he excels equally in prose and in verse, that he is equally untrammelled in both, and that his best friends would find a difficulty if they were called upon to counsel him, whether he should seek his laurels in the one field or in the other.

A word on Mr. Montgomery as the fashionable ladies' preacher. The man who is capable of securing the admiration of a considerable portion of his fellow-creatures and imposing himself upon them as a genius, may be a man very deficient in the higher intellectual faculties, and may be not the less qualified for attaining his object if his moral perceptions are not particularly fine and delicate, but such as will allow him to go through the work which he has set before himself without timidity or compunction; but such a man, however deficient in wisdom and knowledge his followers and worshippers may be, is not to be set down as a fool or an ass, as he is sometimes rashly regarded by men of higher aims and higher intellect, seeing that such a man could not have attained to eminence in his way, such as it is, without the possession of some amount of knowledge of the weaknesses of mankind, and some considerable practical skill in the art of applying this knowledge to the promotion of his own purposes, interests and glory. This is a combination, it should be observed by the bye, of two very distinct gifts. A knowledge of mankind such as would make a first-rate novelist, is frequently wholly uncombined with the practical skill of using this knowledge for the management of mankind. A man with the most complete knowledge of the weakness and the Scoundrelism of poor human nature, or rather with a very great knowledge on these points, for life is too short for the attainment of any thing like perfection in this branch of science, may himself have his weakness habitually played upon by the scoundrelism of his fellowmen. The man however who, in a respectable degree unites both gifts, some knowledge of human nature and some knowledge how to apply it, defensively and offensively, for his own protection and for the subjugation of his neighbours, we beg to submit, is not wholly despi

cable in an intellectual point of view. He may be fairly called a quack, but it is only prejudice, or the over warmth of high minded indignation which will deny to such a man the possession of talents of a certain quality and character,-the quality and character being of very great value in doing business in this lower world.

As a preacher, Mr. Montgomery is allowed by all candid men to understand his art well, and to carry his understanding successfully into practice. He knows that the manner of speaking is not merely as some lawgivers on the subject of elocution have laid it down, as important as the matter, but as far as the living generation are concerned, of a great deal more importance than the matter. He knows all the value of attitude and action, and the whole use of the handkerchief towards the success of a fashionable ministry. He also understands well what is to be done by intonation and the study of intervals, musical and unmusical. He knows, what many great divines and great scholars seem never to have dreamed of, that to use the words of an obscure though very sensible divine, "there are some kinds of words and expressions, some tones and ways of utterance, which will raise the passions and affections of predisposed tempers, without at all enlightening their minds." Now to understand all this, and practically to apply all this, the attitudes and the action, the use of the handkerchief, which must be of no other hue than white, pure white, emblematic of the purity of the preacher and the doctrine preached,-to understand also the use of the "kinds of words and expressions" and the "tones and ways of utterance," all this is surely proof of the possession of knowledge, and of the art of applying this knowledge to the practical purposes of life.

This may pass for a faint sketch of Robert Montgomery the preacher, and those who have looked into his writings will recognise in this sketch the general lineaments of Robert Montgomery the voluminous author. The writer whose works go through numerous editions, must be admitted to understand bookcraft with all its tricks and stratagems. The praise of having chosen great subjects cannot be denied to Mr. Montgomery. His muse has grappled with the greatest of conceivable themes. The Omnipresence of the Deity, the Messiah, Satan, Woman, Luther, are all subjects, the least of them worthy of the greatest pens, and the audacious pen of Mr. Montgomery has meddled with them all-and with every topic related, more or less immediately, to them all. Upon all his subjects, Mr. Montgomery has written with most undesirable copiousness. He seems to have been anxious to try all themes, in order that his forte should not be left undiscovered for want of exercising it. The very miscellaneous contents of the volume, the title of which we give below,* will show at a glance that Mr. Montgomery has put his own self into competition, and has challenged comparison with almost all the poets that have ever "made their thoughts legible" to the world.

Religion and Poetry; being Selections Spiritual and Moral, from the Poetical Works of the Rev. R. Montgomery. Second Edition. London: James Nisbet and Co., Berners Street, 1817.

In Mr. Archer Gurney, who writes both with acuteness and with some sense, Mr. Montgomery has found a real friend. He has cut the poet into nice small bits, and made him tolerably digestible. This to most poets, even good poets, is a real service; for if the most passionate and greedy admirers of poetry would tell the truth, a poem which fills a whole volume, can only be perused in pieces, and not at a heat; and the wearied reader, if the task were imposed on him, of reading a volume of Montgomery without relief from some other volume, would pray to have his punishment commuted into a hundred pages of Josephus or Jeremy Bentham. But Mr. Gurney has not only cut up Mr. Montgomery into small lots, but we are bound to admit has exercised all the discrimination which could be exercised in the task which he had before him, and has, out of the vast mass upon which he had to work, flung away as much worthless rubbish as might set up half a dozen worthless poets in business.

The Introductory Essay by Mr. Gurney is a defence of the poet from the ridicule of those who laugh at him, and the counsel has made on the whole as good an appearance as could have been expected for such a client. He has not neglected to let the world know that Mr. Montgomery has had great men amongst his admirers-that Southey admired him generally, that Mr. Alison the historian has spoken well of him, and that Professor Wilson praised "the Omnipresence" on its first appearance. We suspect that this exhausts the list, which has plenty of parallels in the history of literary criticism. Locke and Addison admired Sir Richard Blackmore, and the favourite poet of Napoleon was Mr. James Macpherson.

In order to throw an air of candour on his pleadings, Mr. Gurney is good enough to admit that Mr. Montgomery has faults. Homer nods-there are spots in the sun-and Mr. Montgomery has his weaknesses. These weakhesses, Mr. Gurney has not concealed;-on the contrary, he has placed in the forefront of his enumeration, one fault of rather considerable magnitude. "Be it at once and distinctly acknowledged," says Mr. Gurney, " as far as any individual perceptions are concerned, that Mr. Montgomery appears to me, in many instances, verbose beyond all reasonable limits, and occasionally mysterious, from a substitution of undoubtedly poetic sound for sense." This, be it observed, is only fault first, and it will be admitted, that Mr. Gurney has here stated it with a degree of honesty and candour rather calculated to alarm the out-and-out admirers of the poet for the divinity of their idol.

As we think Mr. Gurney's Introductory Essay, on the whole, the most valuable portion of the volume before us, in fact, a handsome portico to a rather shabby building, we must not let so ingenious a writer pass without a word to him, on one very reprehensible fiction which he has adopted, in order to create a feeling in favour of his client. Mr. Montgomery has set himself up as a religious poet; that he is a religious man we do not doubt, and that he means to be a religious poet, a great Christian philosopher, and Christian moralist— the rival at once of Milton and Cowper, is evident enough. But Mr.

Montgomery comes before the world in the guise and in the profession of a poet, and neither the cloth which he wears, nor the good design which he has in his head, is any bar to the right which the literary critic has to declare his opinion on the commodity in which Mr. Montgomery deals, and to give his verdict openly, whether it be sublime poetry, or tawdry nonsense. The subjects of Mr. Montgomery's poems, and the merits of his poems are different things-and it would have been better both for Mr. Montgomery himself, and for his subjects too, that they had never come together.

Mr. Gurney, when he has not a case in hand, knows all these things well enough. He knows that a man may reverence the Scripture, while he smiles at Zachary Boyd; and that a man may be a most exemplary Christian, and yet not be obliged to admire Ralph Erskine's Gospel Sonnets. Yet throughout his whole Introductory Essay, it is Mr. Gurney's aim to show, that the abuse and ridicule which have been abundantly heaped on Mr. Montgomery's poetry, have their origin in hatred of religion and morality, and in the spirit of infidelity; and that the difference of opinion which prevail on the merits of his client, just indicate the difference which must ever exist between the renewed and the unrenewed heart. Amongst those who have spoken contemptuously of Mr. Montgomery's Poems, it appears, from this Essay, that we must rank Mr. Macaulay, and the broadest insinuation is thrown out by Mr. Gurney, against this high-minded and honourable man—a better judge of poetry, it may be affirmed, than Mr. Alison-that in his depreciation of Mr. Montgomery, he has been actuated by spite, and by a desire to "insult and wound the feelings of the Christian." This base appeal to the worst passions of the public indicates consciousness of a bad cause-it is a step far beyond the utmost licence of an honourable advocate, and converts literary criticism into one of the arts of the assassin. We may rest assured that the subjects which Mr. Montgomery has chosen, and the tone in which he has treated them, have contributed to their popularity, and that bad as this world is, no writer ever yet lost, but gained favour by being the advocate of morality and piety. And it may be affirmed farther, that no literary work has a chance of extensive and continued popularity which is not in some form or other pervaded by something of a religious spirit.

We need not trouble our readers with extracts from "a poet of twenty or thirty editions." But in order to part on kind terms with Mr. Montgomery, we shall give an extract in order to show, that though Mr. Montgomery has mistaken his vocation, he is not without a capaI city for doing some things respectably. Though his sublime works are all rubbish, he might contribute creditably to an annual, or to a collection of miscellaneous pieces by various hands. The following verses on “An Organ Boy," will be allowed to have merit :

"He hath a spirit, bright in its content,
And playful in its poverty; the rain

Of English clouds, and atmospheric gloom
Of this brave island-elime have not bedinm'd