Dalin was allowed to return to the court in 1761. He stood in great favor and was covered with testimonials of appreciation. He died in 1763, at the moment when King Adolphus Frederic was resolved to make him a state councillor. Dalin was the first writer who made Swedish history popular, and exerted, by his poems and his magazine, and by his education of Gustavus III., a considerable influence upon the history of his own time.
In point of scientific research the historical works of Sven Lagerbring have a much higher value than Dalin’s history, although they lacked the literary excellence of the latter. Lagerbring, who, born in Scania, was professor of history at the University of Lund, carried his work to the times of Charles VIII. A shorter history of his was translated into French and long formed the chief source of continental knowledge of Swedish history.
As a poet Dalin had a rival in the somewhat younger Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, one of the most interesting characters in Swedish history of literature. Her works, chiefly consisting of lyrics and idyls, show a long chain of development from the taste of the Carolinian period to that of the Gustavian epoch. In her deep emotional nature and enthusiasm for all cultural movements she stands without a rival. Receiving an annuity from the government, she was after many adversities able to maintain a literary salon. The men who met there, like Gustavus Philip Creutz and Gustavus Frederic Gyllenborg, were the founders of an academic style in poetry, as was Charles Gustavus Tessin in eloquence.
John Ihre is perhaps the most highly gifted of Swedish philologists and the first whose research had a lasting scientific value. He stood at the summit of contemporary European study of language, and rose a head or more higher than the philologists of his own country in that day. The period was characterized by a movement for the purification and analyzation of the language, Dalin expressing his wish to speak the truth to the Swedes in pure Swedish, and the Academy of Science taking pride in publishing their important papers in the mother tongue. Eric Benzelius, an able critic of the Gothic, and interested in Swedish dialect research, was one of the precursors of Ihre; and so was Olof Celsius, Senior, professor of Greek, later of Oriental languages, who was the first to fix the age of the majority of Runic inscriptions as dating from the Christian era.