Of the dramatists whom Gifford had mentioned with disfavor, only two, Frederick Reynolds (1784–1841) and Miles Andrews (died 1814), were selected for notice by Byron. What the _Mæviad_ had called “Reynolds’ flippant trash” was still enjoying some vogue, and _English Bards_ took occasion to speak of the author as “venting his ‘dammes!’ ‘poohs!’ and ‘zounds!’”[103] Miles Andrews, whose “Wonder-working poetry” had been laughed at in the _Baviad_, was barely mentioned by Byron as a writer who “may live in prologues, though his dramas die.” In general the satire on the stage in _English Bards_ consists of uninteresting remarks on some mediocre dramatists, among them Theodore Hook (1788–1841), Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), James Kenney (1780–1849), Thomas Sheridan (1775–1817), Lumley Skeffington (1762–1850), and T. J. Dibdin (1771–1841). It is a fair contention that this digression is the dreariest portion of the poem. The interpolated lines on the Italian Opera, sent to Dallas, February 22, 1809, after an evening spent at a performance, attack that amusement on the ground of its indecency. They are akin in spirit to similar passages in Young,[104] Pope,[105] Churchill,[106] and Bramston.[107] The satire on less-known poets is indiscriminate and not always discerning. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who, in his _Botanic Garden_ (1789–92), was a decadent imitator of Pope, is contemptuously dismissed as “a mighty master of unmeaning rhyme.” Another once popular bard, William Hayley (1745–1820), still remembered as the friend and biographer of Cowper, is branded with a stinging couplet: “His style in youth or age is still the same, Forever feeble and forever tame.” The Delia Cruscans are passed over as already crushed by Gifford, and “sepulchral Grahame,” “hoarse Fitzgerald,” the Cottles from Bristol, Maurice, and the cobbler poets, Blackett and Bloomfield, get only a fleeting sneer. H. J. Pye, the laureate, once a butt of Mathias, is mentioned only once. Two characterizations, however, are distinguished above the others by their singular virulence. The first was a vicious onslaught on Lord Carlisle, the friend of Fox, Byron’s relative and guardian, who had been included among the sentimental rhymsters in Tickell’s _Wreath of Fashion_. To him his ward had dedicated _Poems Original and Translated_; but the peer’s carelessness about introducing Byron into the House of Lords had irritated the young poet, and he changed what had previously been a flattering notice in _English Bards_ into a ferocious assault: “The puny schoolboy and his early lay Men pardon, if his follies pass away; But who forgives the Senior’s ceaseless verse, Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse.”