ABSTRACT

Robert Gomery, bluntly described by DNB as a ‘poetaster’, added the aristocratic prefix ‘Mont’ to his name whilst still at school. His first poem of note was The Stagecoach, and in the same year, The Age Reviewed. Montgomery was a prolific writer of religious verse of the kind that appealed greatly to the evangelical wing of the Church of England, into which he was ordained in 1835. At the outset of his career Montgomery enjoyed almost universal approval from the reviewing press. The review for A Universal Prayer; Death; a Vision of Heaven; and a Vision of Hell written by Edward Clarkson that appeared in the Sunday Times and the British Traveller, was massively inflated. Montgomery compares this ‘Isle of enchanting forms, and lovely eyes’ with the glories that were Greece and Rome and in the process warns against the similar fate of an imminent fall, as the degenerate times inevitably witness ‘History sorrow o’er her second Rome’.