the Moravian, coming at length
to young Montgomery, 'is a countryman of your Lordship's.' His
Lordship raised himself up, looked hard at the little fellow, and then
shaking his huge whip over his head, 'Ah,' he exclaimed, 'I hope his
country will have no reason to be ashamed of him.' 'The circumstance,'
said the poet, 'made a deep impression on my mind; and I determined--I
trust the resolution was not made in vain--I determined in that moment
that my country should not have reason to be ashamed of me.'

Scotland has no reason to be ashamed of James Montgomery. Of all her
poets, there is not one of equal power, whose strain has been so
uninterruptedly pure, or whose objects have been so invariably
excellent. The child of the Christian missionary has been the poet of
Christian missions. The parents laid down their lives in behalf of the
enslaved and perishing negro; the son, in strains the most vigorous
and impassioned, has raised his generous appeal to public justice in
his behalf. Nor has the appeal been in vain. All his writings bear the
stamp of the Christian; many of them--embodying feelings which all the
truly devout experience, but which only a poet could express--have
been made vehicles for addressing to the Creator the emotions of many
a grateful heart; and, employed chiefly on themes of immortality, they
promise to outlive not only songs of intellectually a lower order, but
of even equal powers of genius, into whose otherwise noble texture sin
has introduced the elements of death.

_28th October 1841._

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{1} 20th October 1841.

CRITICISM--INTERNAL EVIDENCE.

The reader must have often remarked, in catalogues of the writings of
great authors--such as Dr. Johnson, and the Rev. John Cumming, of the
Scotch Church, London--that while some of the pieces are described as
_acknowledged_, the genuineness of others is determined merely by
_internal evidence_. We know, for instance, that the Doctor wrote the
_English Dictionary_, not only because no other man in the world at
the time could have written it, but also because he affixed his name
to the title-page. We know, too, that he wrote some of the best of
Lord Chatham's earlier speeches, just because he said so, and pointed
out the very garret in Fleet Street in which they had been written.
But it is from other data we conclude that, during his period of
obscurity and distress, he wrote prefaces for the _Gentleman's
Magazine_, for some six or seve