Note 28 — Chapter II · ENGLISH SATIRE FROM DRYDEN TO BYRON
Reading edition
Byron praised Crabbe in English Bards as “Nature’s sternest painter, but her best.” In a letter to Moore, February 2, 1818, he termed Crabbe and Rogers “the fathers of present Poesy,” and in his Reply to Blackwood’s (1819) he said publicly: “We are all wrong except Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell.” Crabbe, whom Horace Smith called “Pope in worsted stockings,” seemed, to Byron, to represent devotion to Pope.