and the hereditary right of the Stuarts.  During the controversies of Charles the Second’s reign, in which Dryden took so decided a share, his eulogy on Cromwell was often objected to him, as a proof of inconsistence and apostasy.  One passage, which plainly applies to the civil wars in general, was wrested to signify an explicit approbation of the murder of Charles the First; and the whole piece was reprinted by an incensed antagonist, under the title of “An Elegy on the Usurper O.C., by the author of Absalom and Achitophel, published (it is ironically added) to show the loyalty and integrity of the poet,”—­an odd piece of vengeance, which has perhaps never been paralleled, except in the single case of “Love in a Hollow Tree."[37] The motives of the Duchess of Marlborough, in reprinting Lord Grimestone’s memorable dramatic essay, did not here apply.  The elegy on Cromwell, although doubtless sufficiently faulty, contained symptoms of a regenerating taste; and, politically considered, although a panegyric on an usurper, the topics of praise are selected with attention to truth, and are, generally speaking, such as Cromwell’s worst enemies could not have denied to him.  Neither had Dryden made the errors, or misfortunes, of the royal family, and their followers, the subject of censure or of contrast.  With respect to them, it was hardly possible that a eulogy on such a theme could have less offence in it.  This was perhaps a fortunate circumstance for Dryden at the Restoration; and it must be noticed to his honour, that as he spared the exiled monarch in his panegyric on the usurper, so, after the Restoration, in his numerous writings on the side of royalty, there is no instance of his recalling his former praise of Cromwell.

After the frequent and rapid changes which the government of England underwent from the death of Cromwell, in the spring of 1660, Charles II. was restored to the throne of his ancestors.  It may be easily imagined, that this event, a subject in itself highly fit for poetry, and which promised the revival of poetical pursuits, was hailed with universal acclamation by all whose turn for verse had been suppressed and stifled during the long reign of fanaticism.  The Restoration led the way to the revival of letters, as well as that of legal government.  With diaries, as Dryden has expressed it,

  The officious muses came along,
  A gay, harmonious quire, like angels ever young.

It was not, however, to be expected, that an alteration of the taste which had prevailed in the days of Charles I., was to be the immediate consequence of the new order of things.  The muse awoke, like the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale, in the same antiquated and absurd vestments in which she had fallen asleep twenty years before; or, if the reader will pardon another simile, the poets were like those who, after long mourning, resume for a time their ordinary dresses, of which the fashion has in the meantime passed away.