or villages lie scattered along the river bank, or dot the now barren stretches of the central waste, clearly marking the former existence of a considerable population. The pastoral tribes of this barren expanse do not appear to have paid more than a nominal allegiance to the Moslem rulers, and even in later days, when Ranjit Sinh extended the Sikh supremacy as far as Multan, the country yielded little or no revenue, and the population for the most part remained in a chronic state of rebellion. British influence was first exercised in the district in 1847, when an officer was deputed to effect a summary settlement of the land revenue. Direct British rule was effected on the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The only incident since then was a general rising of the wild clans during the mutiny of 1857, several actions being fought before the clans were defeated and dispersed and order restored.
MONTGOMERY, a city of the United States, the capital of Alabama, is built on a high bluff on the left bank of the Alabama river, 158 miles north-east of Mobile, with which it is connected by rail (180 miles) and by a steamboat service (330 miles). The State-house, rebuilt in 1851 at a cost of $75,000, occupies a commanding site on Capitol Hill. There are a city-hall, a court-house, and two theatres, a large flour-mill, a cotton-factory, two oil-mills, a fertilizer-factory, and several foundries and machine shops. The population was 16,713 in 1880; and, in consequence of the marked increase in commercial and industrial activity since that date, it is now (1883) estimated at 19,000. Founded in 1817, and named after General Richard Montgomery (1736–1775), the town of Montgomery became in 1847 the seat of the State Government instead of Tuscaloosa. From February 1861 to May 1862 it was the capital of the Southern Confederation. In 1865 it was seized by the Federal forces under General Wilson.
MONTGOMERY, Alexander, whose life fell between 1550 and 1610, was the last of the series of Scottish poets who flourished in the 16th century under the patronage of the Jameses. With the union of the crowns, and the transference of James VI. from Edinburgh to London, court favour was withdrawn from Lowland Scotch; it practically ceased to be a literary language, and no poetry of mark was written in the dialect, if we except that of Allan Ramsay's school, till it reappeared in literature as the instrument of the Ayrshire peasant. By a curious coincidence, Montgomery seems to have been, like Burns, a native of Ayrshire. A commendatory sonnet from his pen, extravagantly flattering, as was the custom of the time, was printed with King James's Essays of a Prentice in 1584; he received a pension from the crown a few years later, fell into disgrace apparently for a time, was reinstated in favour, and accompanied his patron to England. As might be expected from the poet of a court where the king himself was a keen critic, Montgomery's miscellaneous poems show a careful attention to form; he tried many metrical experiments, and managed many complicated staves with skill. The sonnet form, at that time a leading fashion in English verse, was also cultivated at the Scottish court, and Montgomery's sonnets possess considerable merit. His most successful poem, published in 1597, and frequently reprinted in Scotland, was the allegory of The Cherry and the Slae. The poet, smitten by Cupid, conceives a longing for some cherries, beautiful fruit, but growing high up on a steep and dangerous bank, above a roaring waterfall. Shall he climb and win? Hope and courage and will urge him to try; dread and danger and despair counsel him to be content with the humbler fruit of the sloe, which grows within easy reach. Experience, reason, wit, and skill debate the question. In the end he resolves to venture for the cherry, with the active help of these last-named powers. The conflicting counsels of the poet's advisers are very pithily expressed in proverbs for and against the adventurous enterprise, and the description of the situation is strong and vivid. Montgomery was no unworthy successor to Henryson and Dunbar in executive finish, but the want of originality in his poems shows that the old impulse was nearly exhausted. There are traces of Italian influence in his sonnets and love songs, but it was much less powerful with him than with his English contemporaries.
MONTGOMERY, James (1771-1854), poet and journalist, was justly described by Lord Byron, in a footnote to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, as "a man of considerable genius," though it was going far beyond the mark to speak of his Wanderer of Switzerland (his first notable poem, published in 1806) as being worth a thousand "Lyrical Ballads." Montgomery was born 4th November 1771, at Irvine in Ayrshire, Scotland. Part of his boyhood was spent in Ireland, but he received his education in Yorkshire, at the Moravian school of Fulneck, named after the original home of the Moravians, to which sect his father belonged. He drifted at an early age into journalism, and edited the Sheffield Iris for more than thirty years. When he began his career the position of a Dissenting journalist was a difficult one, and he twice suffered imprisonment (in 1795 and 1796) on charges that now seem absurdly forced and unfair. His Wanderer was mercilessly ridiculed by the Edinburgh Review, but in spite of this Montgomery published many poems, which had a wide popularity:—The West Indies, 1810; The World Before the Flood, 1812; Greenland, 1819; Songs of Zion, 1822; The Pelican Island, 1827. On account of the religious character of his poetry, he is sometimes confounded with Robert Montgomery, very much to the injustice of his reputation. The inspiring force of James Montgomery's poetry was the humanitarian sentiment which has been such a power in the political changes of this century, and the pulse of this sentiment is nowhere felt beating more strongly than in his verse. His poetry has thus an historical interest altogether apart from its intrinsic value as poetry. But this value is far from contemptible or commonplace. Strictly speaking, Montgomery was more of a rhetorician than a poet, but his imagination was bold, ardent, and fertile, and more than one of his greater contemporaries owed occasional debts to his vigorous invention and even to his casual felicities of diction, while some passages from his poems keep a place in the literature that is universally read and quoted. At the close of his career as a journalist, when all parties agreed in paying him respect, he claimed for his poetry that it was at least not imitative, and the claim was just as regarded conception and choice of subjects; but as regards diction and imagery the influence of Campbell is very apparent in his earlier poems, and the influence of Shelley is supreme in the Pelican Island, his last and best work as a poet. His Lectures on Poetry and General Literature, published in 1833, show considerable breadth of sympathy and power of expression. Memoirs of him were published in seven volumes in 1856-8. They furnish valuable materials for the history of English provincial politics in the 19th century. He died at Sheffield 30th April 1854.
MONTGOMERY, Robert (1807-1855), author of The Omnipresence of the Deity (1828), Satan (1830), and The Messiah (1832), was the Montgomery ridiculed and denounced in Macaulay's famous essay. As a poet, he deserved every word of Macaulay's severe censure; the marks of intellectual feebleness—tautologous epithets, absurdly mixed metaphors, and inapt lines introduced for the sake of rhyme are visible in every page of his versification. It should be mentioned that Macaulay's "trouncing" did not diminish the sale of his so-called poems; one of the works expressly ridiculed reached its 28th edition in 1858. His real name is said to have been Gomery.
MONTH. See Astronomy, vol. ii. p. 800, and Calendar.
MONTILLA, a small and unimportant city of Spain in
