Witches' Sabbath (Goya, 1798) feature of Romanticism, and is to be found for example in Weber's opera "Der Freischütz". However, in a Spanish context, Goya's paintings have been seen as a protest against those who upheld and enforced the values of the Spanish Inquisition, which had been active in Witch hunting during the seventeenth-century Basque witch trials. The later "Witches Sabbath" was painted as a bitter struggle raged between liberals and those in favour of a church and a royalist-lead state, which culminated in the so-called Ominous Decade (1823-1833). Both paintings can be seen as an attack on the superstitious beliefs rife in Spain
Romantic literature in English nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self". George Crabbe (1754–1832) was an English poet who, during the Romantic period, wrote "closely observed, realistic portraits of rural life [...] in the heroic couplets of the Augustan age". Lord Byron who was an admirer of Crabbe's poetry, described him as "nature's sternest painter, yet the best". Modern critic Frank Whitehead has said that "Crabbe, in his verse tales in particular, is an important–indeed, a major–poet whose work has been and still is seriously undervalued." Crabbe's works include "The Village" (1783), "Poems" (1807), "The Borough" (1810), and his