Alexander, an old Scottish poet, who flourished in the reign of James VI. The little that is known about his life is involved in doubt. His nickname of "The Highland Knight," which is mentioned by Dempster, seems to indicate his descent, and at the same time confirms, to a certain extent, the generally-received opinion that he was brought up in Argyllshire. He is supposed to have been an officer in the guard of the Regent Morton, a circumstance that may account for his ordinary title of "Captain Alexander Montgomery." His fame as a poet appears to have been great among his contemporaries. James VI. quoted some of his poems in a work entitled Recoles and Cautelis; and bestowed upon him a pension of 500 merks. But this latter expression of royal favour afterwards led Montgomery into a tedious lawsuit, which brought in its train several other evils. His life was thus embittered, and his poetry assumed a tone of complaint and of severe satire against judges and lawyers. His principal work, the allegorical poem of The Cherry and the Slae, was published in 1607. Between this date and 1611 the poet is said to have died. Montgomery's entire works were published at Edinburgh in 1622, under the superintendence of Mr David Laing, and with a biographical preface by Dr Irving. His chief characteristics as a poet are a vigorous and lively fancy, a love for rural objects, and a power of versification beyond most of his contemporaries.

Montgomery, James, one of the most popular of the sacred or religious poets of England, was born at Irvine in Ayrshire, on the 4th of November 1771. His parents were Irish—his father a preacher of the Society of United Moravian Brethren. James was designed for the same office, and in his sixth year was placed in the Moravian establishment at Fulneck, near Leeds, where he was as effectually excluded from the world and all its ways as if he had been immersed in a Dominican convent. A love of poetry was kindled in him by hearing one of his masters read aloud Blair's Grave. He refused to study for the ministry; and both his parents being then dead (they had died in Barbadoes, his father having been sent on a missionary enterprise to the West Indies), the Brethren at Fulneck put James apprentice to a grocer in Mirfield. He disliked the drudgery of the shop, wrote verses, and at length ran away, with three shillings and sixpence in his pocket. After some wayside hardships and wanderings, he got engaged as shop-boy in the pretty Yorkshire village of Wath, where he remained for a twelvemonth. He next removed to London, intent on publishing a volume of poetry; but the Brethren of the Row were as adverse to his poetical ambition as the Brethren of Fulneck; and he was glad to obtain employment from one of the number, Harrison, a well-known publisher, as clerk and assistant. He soon tired of London, and retraced his steps back to Wath, perhaps induced in some degree by recollection of a certain Nancy Wainwright, "one of the Wath beauties, whom I am afraid," he says, "I sometimes looked at in church more than was proper." The looks came to nothing; and this is the only instance of anything like an approach to gallantry in the long bachelor life of Montgomery. In his twenty-first year he made another and final removal. He went to Sheffield as clerk to Mr Gales, an auctioneer and publisher of a weekly newspaper, the Sheffield Register. This paper was liberal in its tone and tendencies, and Mr Gales was marked out as a disaffected man. The whole nation was at that time agitated by the example or by dread of revolutionized France; spies and informers abounded; and local rulers, like the government, were jealous and eager to convict. The Sheffield editor was wrecked in the political storm; the Register went down, and in its place the Iris came forth, with James Montgomery for its conductor and proprietor. He was now in a congenial and independent position; he had a weekly outlet for all his thoughts and musings, whether in prose or verse; and, though no politician, he had a true poet's love of liberty and hatred of meanness, fraud, or oppression. He was determined to be prudent; he was by nature moffensive; yet within a twelvemonth, before he had completed his twenty-fifth year, he was twice convicted, fined, and imprisoned for libels. He had printed for a hawker some copies of two old songs that remained in type in the office. One of them related to the destruction of the Bastile in 1789, and was surmounted by a rude woodcut representing Liberty and the British lion. The hawker sold the songs in the streets, ingenuously drawing attention to his wares by crying "straws to sell." The purchaser of a straw, price one halfpenny, obtained a copy of the ballads; and one of the Sheffield constables, acute as Dogberry, smelt treason in this device of the straws, and in the "effigies" of Liberty and the Lion. The printer was traced; he was found to be the suspected editor of the Iris; and Montgomery, after a form of trial, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in York Castle, and to pay a fine of L20. His second offence consisted in some reflections on the conduct of a colonel of militia, who had displayed superabundant zeal and recklessness in quelling a street riot. After an extraordinary scene of contradictory evidence, a verdict was given against the publisher of the Iris, and he was sent again to York Castle, but for a period of six months, and with the further penalty of a fine of L30. Such oppression seems almost incredible now; and Montgomery said, that "no man who did not live amidst the delirium of those evil days and that strife of evil tongues, could imagine the bitterness of animosity which infatuated the zealous partisans." In his own case he lived to see it all extinguished. He ultimately found friends among his old opponents—even the fiery militia colonel; but for some years he was neither democratic enough for the wild reformers, nor submissive enough to serve the purposes of the local magnates, and his editorial life was truly a life of martyrdom. He was able to retire from it altogether in the year 1825, and on that occasion a great public banquet, presided over by Viscount Milton, was given him by his townsmen and neighbours, men of all ranks, classes, and distinctions. Politics and political strife were now buried for ever, and there was a long day of warmth and sunshine after the cold blasts of the morning.

The literary career of Montgomery dates from his incarceration in York Castle. He wrote there, and published in 1797, Prison Amusements, a series of short poems, which had only a local reputation. In 1805 he issued another poem, The Ocean; and in 1806 The Wanderer of Switzerland, and other Poems. The last of these volumes had gone through two editions, when it happened to fall into the critical hands of Francis Jeffrey, and received a check which, to the sensitive poet, seemed to threaten nothing less than the annihilation of his hopes and labours. The Edinburgh Review denounced the unfortunate volume in a style of such authoritative reprobation as no mortal verse could be expected to survive. The critic, however, proved a bad prophet: the work continued popular because it was really worthy of popularity; and the criticism must be set down as one of those wanton sins against good taste and proper feeling which the Review occasionally perpetrated in its nonage, before it had attained to years of discretion. Montgomery's next poetical production was written to commemorate the abolition of the slave-trade, and was entitled The West Indies. It is in the heroic couplet of Dryden and Pope, and exhibits the poet's command of that peculiarly English style of verse, the best of all for narrative poetry. In 1813 appeared The World before the Flood, also in the same measure; in 1819, Greenland, a poem founded on the Moravian mission to that remote territory; and in 1827 The Pelican Island, a descriptive poem in blank verse, and which is unquestionably the most original and powerful of all Montgomery's works. Numerous exquisite little pieces from his pen came forth in the annuals and other periodicals; and he collected two volumes of sketches, published under the quaint title of Prose by a Poet. In the winter of 1830–31 he delivered a course of lectures on poetry and general literature at the Royal Institution, which were afterwards published in one volume. He was now recognised as a standard English classic, unrivalled in popular sacred poetry and in the poetry of the domestic affections by all but Cowper. His verse was clear, copious, and flowing; always musical, and often strikingly picturesque. If he had no secret beauties of diction or subtle trains of thought and imagination, his works displayed a high and pure moral feeling and strong religious faith, untinctured by sectarian formality or exclusiveness. In his poetry, as in his life, James Montgomery exhibited a catholic spirit that embraced whatever was lovely and of good report. He looked beyond the grave, but never neglected any form of suffering humanity or call of active duty and brotherly sympathy.

In 1841 a collected edition of Montgomery's works was published in four volumes; and so late as 1853 he issued a series of Original Hymns. To his limited means—the small board accumulated through years of toil and anxiety—the government, on the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel, added a pension of L150 per annum. The latter years of the old poet were thus passed in ease and comfort. To all benevolent and missionary schemes he lent a willing hand; his townsmen were proud of him, and his society was much courted. When he had nearly reached the allotted period of threescore and ten, he made a pilgrimage to Scotland, and finding out the house in the "Half-way" of Irvine where he first saw the light, he shed a flood of tears at the humble scene of his birth. He was publicly received by the magistrates and other inhabitants of Irvine; and in Edinburgh he also met with a marked and honourable reception. His history altogether affords a fine example of virtuous and successful perseverance, and of genius devoted to pure and noble ends,—not a feverish, tumultuous, and splendid career, like that of some greater poetical heirs of immortality, but a course ever brightening as it proceeded,—calm, useful, and happy. He attained to the great age of more than eighty-two years, dying at his residence near Sheffield on the 30th of April 1854. Memoirs of his life and writings, with extracts from his correspondence and journals (somewhat too voluminous and indiscriminate), have been published, in 7 vols. 8vo, 1855–6, by two of his friends, John Holland and James Everett. A complete edition of his poetical works appeared in 1855, in 4 vols. 12mo.

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.

municipal and parliamentary borough of Wales, capital of the county of the same name, is placed at the foot of a high and well-wooded eminence, about 1½ mile from the Severn, and 168 N.W. by N. of London. It is small but well built; and has four principal streets, meeting in a market-place in the centre. The principal buildings are,—the church, an old edifice in the form of a cross, with a modern tower; the guildhall; and the county jail. The borough returned a member to Parliament from the time of Henry III., till the passing of the Reform Act; but since that time it has formed one of six boroughs which together elect one representative. The ancient castle of Montgomery, of which some ruins still remain, was founded by Baldwin, a follower of William the Conqueror, who was appointed Lieutenant of the Marches by that monarch. In consequence of its situation on the borders of England and Wales, it was long considered an important stronghold; and was the subject of frequent contention between the Saxons and the Normans. It received its present name from Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, by whom it was enlarged and strengthened. It afterwards passed into the hands of the crown, by whom the stewardship was granted, in the fifteenth century, to the Herberts of Cherbury. Pop. (1851) 1248.

town in the United States of North America, capital of the state of Alabama, is built on an eminence on the left bank of the Alabama River, 197 miles N.E. of Mobile, and 331 miles above it by river. The town contains 7 churches, 2 academies, a state-house, a bank, and 6 newspaper offices. In the neighbourhood of Montgomery is one of the richest cotton-producing districts of Alabama, and 75,000 bales are annually shipped here. The river is navigable for steamers as far as Montgomery; and as it is never impeded by ice, large vessels ply between this town and Mobile at all seasons of the year. The town is also connected by railway with Atlanta in Georgia; and another line is in progress towards the west. Montgomery has several very pleasant suburbs; and is a very prosperous and enterprising town. Pop. (1850) 4935; (1853) estimated at 7000.