Statue of James Montgomery at Sheffield Cathedral

From Wikipedia:

Montgomery himself expected that his name would live, if at all, in his hymns. Some of these, such as “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed”, “Prayer is the Soul’s Sincere Desire”, “Stand up and Bless the Lord” and the carol “Angels from the Realms of Glory”, are still sung. “The Lord Is My Shepherd” is a popular hymn with many denominations, based on Psalm 23.[10] The earliest of his hymns dates from his days in Wath on Dearne and he added to their number over the years. The main boost came when the Rev. James Cotterill arrived at the parish church St Paul’s, a chapel of ease to St Peter’s, Sheffield’s only parish church, in 1817. (St Paul’s was demolished in 1937.)

Cotterill had compiled and published A Selection of Psalms and Hymns Adapted to the Services of the Church of England in 1810, but to his disappointment and concern, he found that his new parishioners did not take kindly to using it. He therefore enlisted the help of James Montgomery to help him revise the collection and improve it by adding some hymns of the poet’s own composition. This new edition, meeting with the approval of the Archbishop of York (and eventually of the parishioners at St Paul’s), was finally published in 1820. In 1822 Montgomery published his own Songs of Zion: Being Imitations of Psalms,[11] the first of several more collections of hymns. During his life he composed some 400 hymns, although less than a hundred of them are commonly sung today.[12]

Image Credit: Henry Richard Cook, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons