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