judgment of the critics had been disturbed by their religious sentiments, for the final verdict is certainly on the other side. Macaulay, perhaps remembering the epithet "pert" (Age Reviewed, p. 111), and disgusted with the literary puffery of the author of The Puffiad, castigated this offence with a scorpion lash in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1830, where the following passage may serve to give a taste of the critic's quality:—"His works have received more enthusiastic praise, and have deserved more unmixed contempt, than any, which as far as our knowledge extends, have appeared within the last three or four years. His writings bear the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture...." The great critic could not in this case have been inspired with the feelings of political antagonism which influenced him in his savage articles on Croker and Sadler; and it was an act of gratuitous cruelty to reproduce in his collected essays a criticism which the editor of his Life and Letters admits poisoned, if it did not really destroy, the life of its object. William Jerdan[1] asks how it is that Montgomery's' poems have become "a bye-word for all that is contemptible in poetry, and his name abused, as of the worst in the Dunciad"; and adds that "to the dispassionate and competent judge there is enough to warrant his extensive popularity,—many beauties in style and composition,—and the suasive inculcation of moral and religious sentiment." The fact is, it was the fashion then-a-days to abuse Robert Montgomery, as it is now Martin Farquhar Tupper. It is pleasant to censure, for the man who blames asserts himself to be superior to the object of his reprehension; and the ball of opinion once set rolling, the herd are ready to pursue its direction, with cry of parrot-imitation, or like the silly flock that follow the bell-wether.
Besides the attack of Macaulay, Blackwood had a severe article on "Canting Poetry," of which that of Montgomery furnished the text, in the number for August, 1829, p. 239. As for the poem Oxford, it was very severely handled by the author of a contemporary satire, A Poetical Epistle, addressed to Robert Montgomery, etc. An Hyperborean Sacrifice, (Oxford, 1831, 8vo), who is unable to express his opinion of the author of that unfortunate poem with proper decorum:—
"For your name of itself sets with laughter a twitching
The face of each college from chapel to kitchen;
It has pass'd to a bye-word,—we tell it with pain,—
For all that is vacant, and vague, and inane."[2]
Presently, the bard who had sung the praises of the Deity proceeded,—as Fraser has it in a condemnatory article (vol. i. p. 95),—to "take hold of Satan by his horns." The poem thus alluded to was published by Maunder in 1830, and gained for the youthful bard the distinctive appellation which differentiates him from James of Sheffield, who somewhere alludes to the "other Montgomery who writes Satanic poetry," and which made Tom Hood speak of him as "Robert the Devil." It is as the author of this particular poem that he figures in our plate, where, if the source of his inspiration is delicately suggester, a closer inspection will show that there is just that little "miss" between penpoint and finger-tip which is as good as a thousand miles. Thus the writer of one of the many imitations of a popular satire makes the author
- ↑ Men I have Known, p. 443.
- ↑ Page 9.
