John Moultrie (poet) - Works

Works

At school he wrote for the College Magazine, edited the subsequent Horæ Otiosæ, and after leaving Eton contributed verses to the Etonian during 1820–1. His treatment of the subject of Lady Godiva was praised by William Gifford and William Wordsworth. Both in the Etonian and in Charles Knight's Quarterly Magazine his verses appeared under the pseudonym 'Gerard Montgomery.'

In 1837 Moultrie issued a collection of his poems, which were favourably reviewed both in the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review In 1843 he published 'The Dream of Life; Lays of the English Church and other Poems.' It is an autobiographical meditation in verse, which contains comments on contemporaries, including Thomas Babington Macaulay, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Charles Austin, Chauncey Hare Townshend, and Charles Taylor. In 1850 appeared 'The Black Fence, a Lay of Modern Rome,' an anti-papal work, and 'St. Mary, the Virgin and Wife,' both of which had several editions. In 1852 he edited the Poetical Remains of William Sidney Walker.

In 1854 appeared his last volume of verse, 'Altars, Hearths, and Graves.' Among its contents is the 'Three Minstrels,' giving an account of Moultrie's meetings, on different occasions, with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson. In his later work Moultrie became the writer of much blank verse of a conscientious and explanatory type. He also wrote a number of hymns, on special subjects. Most of them are in Benjamin Hall Kennedy's Hymnologia Christiana, 1863.

A complete edition of his poems was published in two volumes in 1876, with a memoir, by Derwent Coleridge.