Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) placing their faith in ghouls, quack doctors and tyrants. Goya had used witchcraft imagery in his 1797–98 "Caprichos" print series, and in his similarly titled 1789 painting "Witches' Sabbath". In both the 1789 and 1822 Sabbath pictures, the Devil is presented as a goat surrounded by a ring of terrified women. The earlier painting uses witchcraft imagery in a manner that inverts the order of traditional Christian iconography. The goat extends his left rather than right hoof towards the child, the quarter moon faces out at the left hand corner of the canvas. These inversions may be metaphor for the
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