Other causes contributed to a temporary revival of the metaphysical poetry.  Almost all its professors, attached to the house of Stuart, had been martyrs, or confessors at least, in its cause.  Cowley, their leader, was yet alive, and returned to claim the late reward of his loyalty and his sufferings.  Cleveland had died a victim to the contempt, rather than the persecution, of the republicans;[38] but this most ardent of cavalier poets was succeeded by Wild, whose “Iter Boreale” a poem on Monk’s march from Scotland formed upon Cleveland’s model, obtained extensive popularity among the citizens of London.[39] Dryden’s good sense and natural taste perceived the obvious defects of these, the very coarsest of metaphysical poets; insomuch, that, in his “Essay on Dramatic Poetry,” he calls wresting and torturing one word into another, a catachresis, or Clevelandism, and charges Wild with being in poetry what the French call un mauvais buffon.

Sprat, and an host of inferior imitators, marched for a time in the footsteps of Cowley; delighted, probably, to discover in Pindaric writing, as it was called, a species of poetry which required neither sound nor sense, provided only there was a sufficient stock of florid and extravagant thoughts, expressed in harsh and bombastic language.

But this style of poetry, although it was for a time revived, and indeed continued to be occasionally employed even to the end of the eighteenth century, had too slight foundation in truth and nature to maintain the exclusive pre-eminence, which it had been exalted to during the reigns of the two first monarchs of the Stuart race.  As Rochester profanely expressed it, Cowley’s poetry was not of God, and therefore could not stand.  An approaching change of public taste was hastened by the manners of the restored monarch and his courtiers.  That pedantry which had dictated the excessive admiration of metaphysical conceits, was not the characteristic of the court of Charles II., as it had been of those of his grandfather and father.  Lively and witty by nature, with all the acquired habits of an adventurer, whose wanderings, military and political, left him time neither for profound reflection nor for deep study, the restored monarch’s literary taste, which was by no means contemptible, was directed towards a lighter and more pleasing style of poetry than the harsh and scholastic productions of Donne and Cowley.  The admirers, therefore, of this old school were confined to the ancient cavaliers, and the old courtiers of Charles I.; men unlikely to lead the fashion in the court of a gay monarch, filled with such men as Buckingham, Rochester, Etherege, Sedley, and Mulgrave, whose time and habits confined their own essays to occasional verses, and satirical effusions, in which they often ridiculed the heights of poetry they were incapable of attaining.  With such men the class of poets, which before the civil war held but a secondary rank, began to rise in estimation.  Waller, Suckling,