William Thomas Fitzgerald (13 April 1759 – 9 July 1829) was a British poet. He has been described as "one of the foremost loyalist versifiers of his day". He wrote patriotic poetry during the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

, including Nelson's Triumph (1798) and Nelson's Tomb (1806). He was the father of the Victorian painter John Anster Fitzgerald

John Anster Fitzgerald

John Anster Christian Fitzgerald was a Victorian era fairy painter and portrait artist. He was nicknamed "Fairy Fitzgerald" for his main genre...

.

Fitzgerald was the son of Colonel John Austen Fitzgerald of the Dutch service and Henrietta Martin, sister of Samuel Martin MP

Samuel Martin (Secretary to the Treasury)

Samuel Martin was a British politician and administrator.-Family:He was the son of Samuel Martin, the leading plantation owner on the West Indies island of Antigua, where he was born, and eldest half-brother of Sir Henry Martin, 1st Baronet , for many years naval commissioner at Portsmouth and...

. Fitzgerald's own sister married barrister John Anthony Fonblanque.

William Cobbett

William Cobbett

William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...

 nicknamed Fitzgerald the "Small Beer Poet." Lord Byron mentioned him in the opening line of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a satirical poem written by Lord Byron. It was first published, anonymously, in March 1809; the opening parodies the first satire of Juvenal. A second, expanded edition followed later in 1809, with Byron identified as the author.The text is referred to in Tom...

:

Still must I hear? — shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl

His creaking couplets in a tavern hall....

Byron was mocking Fitzgerald's practice of reciting one of his poems each year, at the annual dinner of the Literary Fund, held at the Freemasons' Tavern. Fitzgerald replied to Byron, though not publicly; in a copy of English Bards he wrote:

I find Lord Byron scorns my Muse,

Our Fates are ill agreed;

The Verse is safe, I can't abuse

Those lines, I never read.

This copy of the poem somehow came into Byron's possession, and he added a verse reply of his own, dismissing Fitzgerald as a "scribbler."

Fitzgerald was also parodied in the Rejected Addresses of James and Horace Smith

James and Horace Smith

James Smith and Horace Smith , authors of the Rejected Addresses, sons of a solicitor, were both born in London....

(1812); indeed, he suffers the sad fate of being remembered for inspiring the satires of Byron and the Smiths, rather than for his own writings.