At this time all Montague’s wishes pointed towards the Church.  At a later period, when he was a peer with twelve thousand a year, when his villa on the Thames was regarded as the most delightful of all suburban retreats, when he was said to revel in Tokay from the Imperial cellar, and in soups made out of birds’ nests brought from the Indian Ocean, and costing three guineas a piece, his enemies were fond of reminding him that there had been a time when he had eked out by his wits an income of barely fifty pounds, when he had been happy with a trencher of mutton chops and a flagon of ale from the College buttery, and when a tithe pig was the rarest luxury for which he had dared to hope.  The Revolution came, and changed his whole scheme of life.  He obtained, by the influence of Dorset, who took a peculiar pleasure in befriending young men of promise, a seat in the House of Commons.  Still, during a few months, the needy scholar hesitated between politics and divinity.  But it soon became clear that, in the new order of things, parliamentary ability must fetch a higher price than any other kind of ability; and he felt that in parliamentary ability he had no superior.  He was in the very situation for which he was peculiarly fitted by nature; and during some years his life was a series of triumphs.

Of him, as of several of his contemporaries, especially of Mulgrave and of Sprat, it may be said that his fame has suffered from the folly of those editors who, down to our own time, have persisted in reprinting his rhymes among the works of the British poets.  There is not a year in which hundreds of verses as good as any that he ever wrote are not sent in for the Newdigate prize at Oxford and for the Chancellor’s medal at Cambridge.  His mind had indeed great quickness and vigour, but not that kind of quickness and vigour which produces great dramas or odes; and it is most unjust to him that his loan of Honour and his Epistle on the Battle of the Boyne should be placed side by side with Comus and Alexander’s Feast.  Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole, Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his.  But fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought worthy to be admitted into any collection of our national classics.

It has long been usual to represent the imagination under the figure of a wing, and to call the successful exertions of the imagination flights.  One poet is the eagle; another is the swan; a third modestly compares himself to the bee.  But none of these types would have suited Montague.  His genius may be compared to that pinion which, though it is too weak to lift the ostrich into the air, enables her, while she remains on the earth, to outrun hound, horse and dromedary.  If the man who possesses this kind of genius attempts to ascend the heaven of invention, his awkward and unsuccessful efforts expose him to derision.  But if he will be content to stay in the terrestrial region of business, he will find that