Who among the following refers to Byron’s works as “monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and imposture”?

The correct answer is Robert Southey.

This critical and highly hostile characterization of Lord Byron’s poetry comes from Robert Southey, who was a contemporary Poet Laureate and a prominent literary antagonist of Byron.

The animosity between the two writers was well-known in Romantic literary circles. Southey, representing a more traditional and conservative moral stance, famously condemned the "Satanic School" of poetry, a term he coined to describe the work of Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the preface to his poem A Vision of Judgement (1821), Southey attacked the moral character of their writings, referring to them as "monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and imposture," accusing them of acts of rebellion against moral and religious order.

Byron later retaliated brilliantly with his own satirical masterpiece, The Vision of Judgment (1822), which directly mocked Southey’s poetry and political flip-flopping, cementing their literary feud in history.