MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF. JAMES MONTGOMERY, INCLUDING SELECTIONS FROM HIS CORRESPONDENCE, REMAINS IN PROSF SUBJECTS. BY JOHN HOLLAND AND JAMES EVERETT. VOL. VII. "There is a living spirit in the lyre, World before the Flood. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, LONGMANS, & ROBERTS. PREFACE TO VOLUME SEVENTH. AT the conclusion of this work, nothing further need be said of the relation of the biographers whose names appear together on the title-page, than was stated in the Preface affixed to the first volume. The biographers have, however, one or two pleasant duties jointly to perform. And first, they cannot but acknowledge the liberality of the publishers of these Memoirs, in engaging in so voluminous a work, which, on several grounds, was likely to be the reverse of popular or profitable. By adopting this course, they showed themselves willing to participate in an early, earnest, and not unpromising effort to raise a monument to the memory of a man, and in honour of a poet, with whom during so many years they had enjoyed agreeable, personal, as well as satisfactory business intercourse: and this public acknowledgment is felt by those who now make it, to be only embodying what they believe would have been gratifying to their departed friend himself, could he have anticipated the nature of the transaction. The biographers have also to express their grateful acknowledgments to those individuals who have so kindly and so freely contributed towards what must be allowed to form a most precious and instructive, as well as illustrative, element of these volumes,—the original Letters of Montgomery. To specify all the contributions to this essential characteristic of the work, would appear as ostentatious as it is unnecessary. But it would seem hardly just not to mention Mr. Leader, who placed in our hands the whole of the voluminous correspondence with his late relative, Mr. (afterwards the Rev. Dr.) John Pye Smith, at a most critical period of the poet's life; William Jevons, Esq., of Liverpool, for the Roscoe letters; the Rev. Dr. Raffles; Mrs. Mary Anne Everett Green, for the letters addressed to her late father, the Rev. Robert Wood; the Rev. Peter Latrobe, who in this and other ways has contributed to enrich a work, which we are gratified to believe he, and the Moravian Brethren generally, are willing to accept as a fair and friendly reflex of the peculiar relation which subsisted between Montgomery and themselves; Henry Bewley, Esq., of Dublin, for the correspondence between the poet and Miss Rowntree, the worthy Quakeress; Mrs. M'Coy, for the letters to George Bennet, which indeed, as well as those forming the Aston collection, and some others, came into our hands by the intervention of the writer himself during his lifetime; our friend, John Blackwell, of Newcastle-uponTyne; Mrs. Foster, of Woolwich; to Samuel Roberts, Esq., and the Rev. J. J. Montgomery. There are two other individuals from whom, even at the risk of offending their delicacy, we must not withhold a more explicit acknowledgment of our obligations, we mean Miss |