Page:Cherrie and the slae.pdf/9

 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. ALEXANDER MONTGOMERY, an early poet of considerable fame, appears to have been a younger son of Montgomery of Hazlehead Castle, in Ayr- shire, a branch of the noble family of Eglintoune. He flourished in the reign of James VI., but pro- bably wrote verses at an antecedent period, as some of his compositions are transcribed in the Banna- tyne Manuscript, which was written in 1568. The date of his birth—further than that it was upon an Easter-day—the place and nature of his education, and the pursuits of his early years, are all involved in obscurity. He is said to have been brought up in the county of Argyle; a fact which seems to gather some confirmation from a passage in Demp- ster-"eques Montanus vulgo vocatus,"—as if he had acquired some common nickname, such as "the Highland trooper;" for Montgomery never was knighted. There is some reason to suppose that he was at one time a domestic or commander in the guard of the regent Morton. His most familiar title, “Captain Alexander Montgomery,' renders it probable that the latter was the nature of his office, for the word Captain seems to have been first used in Scotland, in reference to officers in the immediate service of the sovereign. Melville, in his Diary, mentions that when Patrick Adamson was promoted to the archbishopric of St. Andrews, an event which occurred in the year 1577,) there was then at court "captain Montgomery, a good honest man, and the regent's domestic," who, re- collecting a phrase which the new primate had been accustomed to use in his sermons, remarked