THEIR AUTHORS AND ORIGIN. 277
for a year, he went to London, carrying with him some of his early poems to offer to the publishers. But the cold caution of the London publishers destroyed his golden dream of sudden fame, and sent him back almost broken-hearted to his business routine at Wath.
From Wath, Montgomery went, in 1792, to Sheffield, to assist a Mr. Gales, an auctioneer and bookseller, and the printer of the " Sheffield Register." In 1794, when Mr. Gales left England to avoid persecution for the political principles he had advocated in his paper, Montgomery undertook it, and under the altered name of the " Iris," edited it for thirty-one years.
But as the principles of the paper continued to be too liberal for the government of that day, Montgomery was fined and im prisoned ; in the first instance, for reprinting a song commemo rating " The Fall of the Bastile," and in the second, in 1795, for the account he gave of a riot at Sheffield. The " Iris " was much read, and the state prosecution may be accepted as a tribute to the power of the pen it was intended to stop. During Montgomery s second imprisonment, John Pye Smith, then a village preacher, and afterwards one of the brightest ornaments of the congregational body, courageously undertook the editorship of the persecuted " Iris." Montgomery continued to advocate those liberal principles which he lived to see prevail, and he found his incarceration less irksome than he had feared, cheered as it was by the production of short poems, which appeared in 1797, with the title of " Prison Amusements."
Of his other works, the principal were : "The Wanderer of Switzerland," 1806 a denunciation of the war spirit of the French revolutionists, given in an account of the fortunes of a Swiss family, driven forth from their country in consequence of its subjugation by the French. This work, notwithstanding that it was met by the frown of the " Edinburgh Review," became very popular, and had a large sale. In the following year Mont gomery published " The West Indies," a heroic poem, written in honour of the abolition of the African slave-trade by the British
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