1830.] Mr. Edward Clarkson. 2()j 



with Milton. Encouraged accordingly by the success of Pollock's Course 

 of Time (which unostentatiously, and without puffing, has reached a 

 ninth edition), he resolved to take the Deity under his protection, in 

 the same way as, in order to strike a balance between the two powers, 

 he has since taken the Devil. His previous poetical efforts, as the reader 

 cannot fail to have observed, admirably qualified him for this new 

 task. The difference between a coarse, vulgar satire upon opera-dancers, 

 dandies, and so forth, and a poem on so overwhelming a subject as the 

 " Omnipresence of the Deity," is so trifling ; the intellect requisite to 

 ensure success in both cases is so similar in its kind, that no wonder 

 Mr. Montgomery, who had shone in the one, fancied himself equally 

 well qualified to shine in the other ! On the appearance of this new 

 poem, every engine was put in motion that might possibly lift it above 

 its level. One reviewer asserted that it entitled its author to a tomb in 

 Westminster Abbey ; another that it was replete with Miltonic subli- 

 mity ; a third, that it was the finest production that had appeared in 

 England since the Lord knows when. In consequence of such sicken- 

 ing adulation, the poem rose rapidly into notice, or to adopt Mr. Clark- 

 son's phraseology, soared like the " heliacal emersion of a new star 

 from the lower belt of the vulgar horizon." Its author's age a fact 

 which was artfully trumpeted about induced the public to overlook its 

 defects, nay, even to discover hidden beauties beneath them. All that 

 was unintelligible was pronounced sublime : all that was extravagant, 

 picturesque. Insanity was styled imagination, and stark-staring non- 

 sense a profound spirit of holiness. The saints, in particular, were in 

 extasies. A new Shiloh, they exclaimed, had arisen among them ; and 

 more than one soft, fat, elderly spinster was heard to speak in raptures 

 of " the miraculous Mr. Montgomery ." Yet what, after all viewed in 

 an impartial spirit -are the real intrinsic merits of the "Omnipre- 

 sence?" Our readers shall judge for themselves. The poem opens 

 with the following lines : 



" Thou Uncreate, Unseen, and Undefined ! 

 Source of all life, and Fountain of the mind ! 

 Pervading Spirit ! whom no eye can trace ; 

 Felt through all time, and working in all space ; 

 Imagination cannot paint that spot, 

 Around above beneath where thou art not." 



The two last lines are clearly superfluous. If the Spirit of the Deity 

 works in all space, what occasion is there to tell us, in the very next 

 ^couplet, that imagination cannot paint the spot where it is not ? The 

 lines are mere sound : nothing more. 



" But all was silent as a world of dead, 



Till the great deep her living swarms outspread ; 

 Forth from her teeming bosom sudden came 

 Immingled monsters, mighty, without name ; 

 Then plumy tribes winged into being there " 



Where ? upon the great deep, we presume 



t( And played their gleamy pinions on the air ; 

 Till thick as dews upon a twilight green, 

 Earth's living creatures rose upon the scene." 



The meaning of this passage if it possess a meaning is, that the 

 world was silent till the great deep outspread her swarms; when, sud- 



