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. 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