Life
He was the second illegitimate son of John Montagu by Martha Ray; he was acknowledged by his father, and brought up at Hinchingbrooke, Huntingdonshire. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1786, graduated B.A. (fifth wrangler) in 1790, and proceeded M.A. in 1793. On 30 January 1789 he was admitted a member of Gray's Inn, but continued to reside at Cambridge until 1795, when, having by a technical loophole lost the portion of inheritance intended for him by his father, he came to London to read for the bar.
He was on intimate terms with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, whose early enthusiasm for the ideas of the French Revolution he shared. In the autumn of 1797 he made a tour in the Midlands counties with William Godwin. He spent a week in Godwin's house in 1797, assisting the distraught Godwin, whose wife Mary Wollstonecraft was dying, following the birth of a daughter.
He was called to the bar on 19 May 1798. By Sir James Mackintosh, whose acquaintance he soon afterwards made, and with whom he went the Norfolk circuit, he was converted to political moderation and the study of Francis Bacon. Montagu was also a friend of Samuel Parr. Montagu never became eminent as a pleader, but he gradually acquired a practice in chancery and bankruptcy; his leisure time he devoted to legal and literary work.
Appointed by Lord Erskine, 1806–7, to a commissionership in bankruptcy, Montau set himself to reform the bankruptcy law. He also founded in 1809 the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge upon the Punishment of Death. In July 1825 he gave evidence before the chancery commission, and suggested a radical reform. In Trinity term 1835 Montagu was made K.C., and soon afterwards accountant-general in bankruptcy. His tenure of this office, which lasted until 1846, he established the liability of the Bank of England to pay interest on bankruptcy deposits.
He was a member of the Athenæum Club, and his town house, 25 Bedford Square, was for many years a centre of reunion for London literary society. He was one of the most attentive listeners to Coleridge's monologues at Highgate. He died at Boulogne-sur-Mer on 27 November 1851.
Read more about this topic: Basil Montagu
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“You want to prepare your child to think as he gets older. You want him to be critical in his judgments. Teaching a child, by your example, that there’s never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience—but it won’t help him in the long run to be discriminating in choices and thinking.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)
“There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”
—George Borrow (1803–1881)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)