ROBERT

See also:

• MONTGOMERY
• MONTGOMERY ( Tre' Faldwyn)
• MONTGOMERY, GABRIEL, SEIGNEUR DE LORGES, COMTE DE (c. 1530-1574)
• MONTGOMERY, JAMES (1771-1854)
• ROBERT MONTGOMERY (1807-1855)

MONTGOMERY (1807-1855)  , English poet, natural son of Robert Gomery, was born at Bath in 1807 . He was educated at a private school in Bath, and founded an unsuccessful weekly paper in that city . In 1828 he published The Omni-presence of the Deity, which hit popular religious sentiment so exactly that it ran through eight editions in as many months . In 1830 followed The Puffiad (a satire), and Satan . An exhaustive review in Blackwood by John Wilson, followed in the thirty-first number by a burlesque of Satan, and two articles in the first volume of Fraser, ridiculed Montgomery's pretensions and the excesses of his admirers . But his name was immortalized by Macaulay's famous onslaught in the Edinburgh Review for April 1830 . As a poet, he deserved every word of Macaulay's severe censure, though the brutality of the attack cannot be defended . This exposure did not, however, diminish the sale of his poems; The Omnipresence of the Deity reached its 28th edition in 1858 . In 1830 Montgomery entered Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1833 and M.A. in 1838 . Taking holy orders in 1835 he obtained a curacy at Whittington, Shropshire, which he exchanged in '1836 for the charge of the church of St Jude, Glasgow . In 1843 he removed to the parish of St Pancras, London, when he was minister of Percy Chapel . He died at Brighton in 1855 .

He also wrote The

Messiah (1832), Woman, the Angel of Life (1833), Oxford (1831), and many devotional and theological works .