Merry did not fail to find in his own day apologists of some pretensions to taste. I find in the notes to George Dyer's poem, _The Poet's Fate_, published in 1797—which contains early and interesting laudations not only of his school-fellows Lamb and Coleridge, but also of Wordsworth and Southey—the following reference to Merry:—“But, after all, though the hero of the _Baviad_ betrayed glitter and negligence—though he misled the taste of some, too much inclined to admire and imitate defects, yet Merry's writings possess poetical merits; and the spirit of liberty and benevolence which breathes through them is ardent and sincere.” The criticism may be incorrect, but it is worth noting, because it is the criticism of a contemporary. Had it not been for Coleridge's fervently expressed admiration for Bowles's sonnets, which so perplexes critics who do not judge literature from a historical point of view, the world would have continued to sneer at him, with Byron, as “simple Bowles,” and to know him only by Byron's line. The fact is, literary history will never be intelligently written, till it is studied in the spirit of the naturalist, to whom the tares are as interesting as the wheat. We may, perhaps, give the Della Cruscans, with their desperate strainings after poetic fire and poetic diction, the credit of having done something to shake the supremacy of versified prose; of having forwarded, however feebly, the poetic emancipation which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to consummate. The false extravagance of Della Crusca may have cleared the way for the truthful extravagance of Keats. It is, I am aware, customary to attribute the regeneration of English poetry to the French Revolution, which “shook up the sources of thought all over Europe,” but the critics who use these glib catch-words are in no hurry to point out a concrete chain of logical connection between Paris mobs and sequestered poets. Plain judges will ever consider it a far cry from _The Rights of Man_ to _Christabel_. At all events, Dyer was right in deprecating the savagery of Gifford's satire. The question Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? will apply to other schools and fashions besides that of the “elegant Cesario's,” whom Leigh Hunt designated _par excellence_ as “the plague of the Butterflies.” And here, I think, we touch upon the moral which I promised at the outset.