fervent with spiritual urgency; the storms of sad confusion neither shaking his purpose nor blinding his vision.

"For, seeing thus the course of things must run,
He looks thereon not strange, but as foredone.
He looks thereon,
As from the shore of Peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in Impiety."

CHAPTER IV.

SETTLEMENT AT SHEFFIELD-NATIONAL DISQUIET-POLITICAL HYMN -GALES'S DEPARTURE-ESTABLISHMENT OF THE IRIS-INVOCACATION TO THE IRIS-POSITION AS Editor.

MONTGOMERY'S stay in London did not last beyond a year. His clerkship at Harrison's afforded him a comfortable living, and happily prevented his bringing away any of the sorry experiences, which talent dogged by poverty often encountered in the by-ways of that great metropolis.

Disappointments he indeed had, but those only which chasten, without seriously depressing; serving to bring men to a juster estimate of themselves, and directing them to that toil without which the brightest abilities are vainly given.

Self-help is better than patronage: so Montgomery thought, as he turned his back on London, in the month of March, and took a stage-coach lumbering to Wath, in every respect, we doubt not, a wiser man.

Having suf

fered none of the hardships of poverty, so, also, he had lapsed into none of the corrupting seductions of city life. His shyness of society, and the reflective cast of his mind, while they might have sometimes hindered his introduction to scenes and places favorable to intellectual quickening, helped to preserve that purity of moral principle which was the beauty and excellency of his character.

His old master on the banks of the Dearne cordially welcomed him back, and he resumed his old post at the desk, in his counting-room, to look out for a more fortunate turn to his affairs. Nor was he long waiting.

Collecting accounts one day at Great Houghton, Montgomery took up a newspaper and read the following advertisement: "Wanted, in a counting-house in Sheffield, a clerk. None need apply but such as have been used to book-keeping, and can produce undeniable testimonials of character. Terms and specimens of writing to be left with the printer."

The young man, now just twenty-one, recognized the situation as one which he could suitably fill, and immediately despatched a letter to the advertiser, offering his services, and soliciting an interview. The result was a visit. to Sheffield and his engaging the place.

Joseph Gales, his new employer, was printer, bookseller, and auctioneer, a triad of vocations not unusual at that time; and, in addition, editor of the Sheffield Register, a respectable weekly of some note in its day.

On the second of April, 1792, the young man came to his new lodgings in Mr. Gales's family at the Hartshead, where the handsome and commodious shop of his master was one of the most conspicuous buildings on the street; while its shelves, lined with books, must have seemed to the hungry young clerk an inexhaustible supply of daily food.

Sheffield then was not the Sheffield of the present. Its fashionable promenade, -"Ladies' Walk," is now only a shabby street, with scarce a vestige of its past gentility. Instead of three or four churches, churches and chapels, a score or more, testify to its modern growth. Its famous cutlery has altered in quantity rather than quality, giving

SETTLEMENT AT SHEFFIELD.

53

it only wider fame; while the tall chimneys of its great steam engines are monuments of its capital and labor, enriching the rich, and pouring comfort into the lap of honest industry.

Mr. Gales's family, in the bosom of which Montgomery was soon domesticated, consisted of a wife and three children. His father, mother, and three sisters, resided in the pleasant village of Eckington, six miles south of Sheffield, -a delightful summer walk, amid the choice beauties of English rural scenery.

Mrs. Gales was herself a woman of literary tastes, occasionally contributing to the columns of her husband's paper, and the author of a novel in three volumes, of how much local celebrity we do not know.

Thus was Montgomery surrounded by influences agreeable to his tastes, and favorable to his mental improvement. The author of the English Garden lived a few miles off, at the Ashton rectory; and though a "real living poet, who had published a volume," was a sight much coveted by our poet, he never happened to have met with Mason. Who first gratified this natural curiosity we do not find, for it was possibly when curiosity was somewhat abated. of its youthful glow.

But if not a poet, a living poem crossed his path,-the ragged proof sheets of the Pleasures of Memory from the pocket of a compositor, newly arrived from a London office, where it had been printed. It bore no author's name, and all the printer could reveal of its paternity was that one "Parson Harrison" was supposed to be the writer.

It shortly appeared with Rogers's name, and was received with kindly courtesy in the literary circles of England. Perhaps we cannot better introduce our readers into the

stirring scenes which marked the time of Montgomery's engagement with Mr. Gales, than by a retrospective glance at them, given in his own words.

"I came to Sheffield in the spring of 1792, a stranger and friendless, without any prospect or intention of making a long residence in it, much less of advancing myself, either by industry or talents, to a situation that should give me. the opportunity of doing much evil or good, as I might act with indiscretion or temperance. The whole nation, at that time, was disturbed from its propriety by the example and influence of revolutionized France; nor was there a district in the kingdom more agitated by the passions and prejudices of the day than this. The people of Sheffield, in whatever contempt they may have been held by those ignorant of their character, were then, as they now are, a reading and thinking people. According to the knowledge which they had, therefore, they judged for themselves on the questions of reform in parliament, liberty of speech and of the press, the rights of man, and other problems, concerning which the wisest and best of men have been divided, and never more so than at the period mentioned, when the decision either way was not to be merely speculative but practical, and to affect permanently the condition of all classes in the realm, from the monarch to the pauper, so deep, comprehensive, and prospective was the view taken by everybody on the issue of the controversy.

"The two parties in Sheffield, as elsewhere, arranged themselves on the contrary extremes; some being for everthing old, the rest for everything that was new. There was no moderation on either side; each had a little of the truth, while the main body of it lay between: yet it was not for this they were contending (like the Trojans and