seldom been incorporated into the works of fiction which are now issuing
with such thoughtless haste from the press of the metropolis. In Dr.
Whitaker's History of Craven--which in spite of his extravagant
prejudices in favour of gentle blood, and in derogation of commercial
opulence, is still an excellent model for all future writers of local
history--there is a ground-work laid for at least a dozen ordinary novels.
To say nothing of the legendary tales, which the peasantry relate of the
minor families of the district, of the Bracewells, the Tempests, the
Lysters, the Romilies, and the Nortons,--whose White Doe, however, has
been immortalized by the poetry of Wordsworth,--can any thing be more
pregnant with romantic adventure than the fortunes of the successive
chieftains of the lordly line of Clifford? Their first introduction to
the North, owing to a love-match made by a poor knight of Herefordshire
with the wealthy heiress of the Viponts and the Vesys! Their rising
greatness, to the merited disgrace and death of Piers de Gavestone and
his profligate minions! and their final exaltation to the highest honours
of the British peerage, which they have now enjoyed for five hundred
years, to the strong hand and unblenching heart with which they have
always welcomed the assaults of their most powerful enemies! Of the first
ten lords of Skipton castle, four died in the field and one upon the
scaffold! The "black-faced Clifford," who sullied the glory which he
acquired by his gallantry at the battle of Sandal, by murdering his
youthful prisoner the Earl of Rutland, in cold blood, at the termination
of it, has gained a passport to an odious immortality from the soaring
genius of the bard of Avon. But his real fate is far more striking, both
in a moral and in a poetical point of view, than that assigned to him by
our great dramatist. On the evening before the battle of Towton Field,
and after the termination of the skirmish which preceded it, an unknown
archer shot him in the throat, as he was putting off his gorget, and so
avenged the wretched victims, whose blood he had shed like water upon