The reader will find in our columns a report, as ample as our limits have allowed, of the public breakfast given in Edinburgh on Wednesday last[1] to our distinguished countryman James Montgomery, and his friend the missionary Latrobe. We have rarely shared in a more agreeable entertainment, and have never listened to a more pleasing or better-toned address than that in which the poet ran over some of the more striking incidents of his early life. It was in itself a poem, and a very fine one. An old and venerable man returning to his native country after an absence of sixty years––after two whole generations had passed away, and the grave had closed over almost all his contemporaries––would be of itself a matter of poetical interest, even were the aged visitor a person of but the ordinary cast of thought and depth of feeling. How striking the contrast between the sunny, dream-like recollections of childhood to such an individual, and the surrounding realities––between the scenes and figures on this side the wide gulf of sixty years, and the scenes and figures on that: yonder, the fair locks of infancy, its bright, joyous eyes, and its speaking smiles; here, the grey hairs and careworn wrinkles of rigid old age, tottering painfully on the extreme verge of life! But if there attaches thus a poetic interest to the mere circumstances of such a visit, how much more, in the present instance, from the character of the visitor,––a man whose thoughts and feelings, 147 tinted by the warm hues of imagination, retain in his old age all the strength and freshness of early youth!

Hogg, when first introduced to Wilkie, expressed his gratification at finding him so young a man. We experienced a similar feeling on first seeing the poet Montgomery. He can be no young man, who, looking backwards across two whole generations, can recount from recollection, like Nestor of old, some of the occurrences of the third. But there is a green old age, in which the spirits retain their buoyancy, and the intellect its original vigour; and the whole appearance of the poet gives evidence that his evening of life is of this happy and desirable character. His appearance speaks of antiquity, but not of decay. His locks have assumed a snowy whiteness, and the lofty and full-arched coronal region exhibits what a brother poet has well termed the ‘clear bald polish of the honoured head;’ but the expression of the countenance is that of middle life. It is a clear, thin, speaking countenance: the features are high; the complexion fresh, though not ruddy; and age has failed to pucker either cheek or forehead with a single wrinkle. The spectator sees at a glance that all the poet still survives––that James Montgomery in his sixty-fifth year is all that he ever was. The forehead, rather compact than large, swells out on either side towards the region of ideality, and rises high, in a fine arch, into what, if phrenology speak true, must be regarded as an amply developed organ of veneration. The figure is quite as little touched by age as the face. It is well but not strongly made, and of the middle size; and yet there is a touch of antiquity about it too, derived, however, rather from the dress than from any peculiarity in the person itself. To a plain suit of black Mr. Montgomery adds the voluminous breast ruffles of the last age––exactly such things as, in Scotland at least, the fathers of the present generation wore on their wedding-days. These are perhaps but small details; but we notice 148 them just because we have never yet met with any one who took an interest in a celebrated name, without trying to picture to himself the appearance of the individual who bore it.

There are some very pleasing incidents beautifully related in the address of Mr. Montgomery. It would have been false taste and delicacy in such a man to have forborne speaking of himself. His return, after an absence equal to the term of two full generations, to his native cottage, is an incident exquisitely poetic. He finds his father’s humble chapel converted into a workshop, and strangers sit beside the hearth that had once been his mother’s. And where were that father and mother? Their bones moulder in a distant land, where the tombstones cast no shadow when the fierce sun looks down at noon upon their graves. ‘Taking their lives in their hands,’ they had gone abroad to preach Christ to the poor enslaved negro, for whose soul at that period scarce any one cared save the United Brethren; and in the midst of their labours of piety and love, they had fallen victims to the climate. He passed through the cottage and the workshop, calling up the dream-like recollections of his earliest scene of existence, and recognising one by one the once familiar objects within. One object he failed to recognise. It was a small tablet fixed in the wall. He went up to it, and found it intimated that James Montgomery the poet had been born there. Was it not almost as if one of the poets or philosophers of a former time had lighted, on revisiting the earth as a disembodied spirit, on his own monument? Of scarce less interest is his anecdote of Monboddo. The parents of the poet had gone abroad, as we have said, and their little boy was left with the Brethren at Fulneck, a Moravian settlement in the sister kingdom. He was one of their younger scholars at a time when Lord Monboddo, still so well known for his great talents and acquirements, and his scarce less marked eccentricities, 149 visited the settlement, and was shown, among other things, their little school. His Lordship stood among the boys, coiling and uncoiling his whip on the floor, and engaged as if in counting the nail-heads in the boarding. The little fellows were all exceedingly curious; none of them had ever seen a real live lord before, and Monboddo was a very strange-looking lord indeed. He wore a large, stiff, bushy periwig, surmounted by a huge, odd-looking hat; his very plain coat was studded with brass buttons of broadest disk, and his voluminous inexpressibles were of leather. And there he stood, with his grave, absent face bent downwards, drawing and redrawing his whip along the floor, as the Moravian, his guide, pointed out to his notice boy after boy. ‘And this,’ said the Moravian, coming at length to young Montgomery, ‘is a countryman of your Lordship’s.’ His Lordship raised himself up, looked hard at the little fellow, and then shaking his huge whip over his head, ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘I hope his country will have no reason to be ashamed of him.’ ‘The circumstance,’ said the poet, ‘made a deep impression on my mind; and I determined––I trust the resolution was not made in vain––I determined in that moment that my country should not have reason to be ashamed of me.’

Scotland has no reason to be ashamed of James Montgomery. Of all her poets, there is not one of equal power, whose strain has been so uninterruptedly pure, or whose objects have been so invariably excellent. The child of the Christian missionary has been the poet of Christian missions. The parents laid down their lives in behalf of the enslaved and perishing negro; the son, in strains the most vigorous and impassioned, has raised his generous appeal to public justice in his behalf. Nor has the appeal been in vain. All his writings bear the stamp of the Christian; many of them––embodying feelings which all the truly devout experience, but which only a poet could express––have 150 been made vehicles for addressing to the Creator the emotions of many a grateful heart; and, employed chiefly on themes of immortality, they promise to outlive not only songs of intellectually a lower order, but of even equal powers of genius, into whose otherwise noble texture sin has introduced the elements of death.

28th October 1841.