MONTGOMERY, Robert, the author of several religious poems, was born at Bath in 1807. He had hardly reached his twenty-first year when his poetical fame was established by the publication of his Omnipresence of the Deity. His swelling epithets, and the pompous roll of his versification, satisfied the majority of the readers of poetry; his choice of his theme recommended him to the religious public; and at the same time the dullness of his intellect, the barrenness of his imagination, and his many broken metaphors, passed undetected. The poem, therefore, reached an almost unprecedented popularity, and passed through eight editions in an equal number of months. Stimulated by this success, his versifying faculty produced in the same year another volume containing, A Universal Prayer, Death, A Vision of Heaven, and A Vision of Hell. Satan followed in 1829, and raised the author’s reputation to its greatest height. Montgomery now began to contemplate studying for the church. He entered Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1830, took the degree of B.A. in 1833, and was ordained in 1835. His first pastoral charge was the curacy of Whittington in Shropshire. From it he removed in 1836 to Percy Street chapel, London. By this time his preaching was acquiring a popularity scarcely less false in its foundation than that which had greeted his poetry. The crowds that flocked to hear him mistook his affected attitudes for studied elegance, his vague generalizations for profound thinking, and his noisy ranting for true oratory. His fame as a preacher continued to increase after he had removed, in 1838, to his ultimate charge of St Jude’s chapel, Glasgow. Towards the close of his life he published several works, both prose and poetical, on religious subjects. He died at Brighton in December 1855.