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 Wakefield Bridge. The vengeance of the Yorkists was not, however, satiated by the death of the Butcher, as Leland informs us that they called him:—for they attainted him, in the first year of the reign of Edward the Fourth, and granted his estates, a few years afterwards, to the Duke of Gloucester, who retained them in his iron grasp till he lost them with his crown and life at the battle of Bosworth. The history of his son is a romance ready made. His relations, fearing lest the partisans of the house of York should avenge the death of the young Earl of Rutland on the young Lord Clifford, then a mere infant, concealed him for the next twenty-five years of his life in the Fells of Cumberland, where he grew up as hardy as the heath on which he vegetated, and as ignorant as the rude herds which bounded over it. One of the first acts of Henry the Seventh, after his accession to the throne, was to reverse the attainder which had been passed against his father; and immediately afterwards the young lord emerged from the hiding place, where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, and with the manners and education of a mere shepherd. Finding himself more illiterate than was usual even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in the beautiful forest of Barden, and there, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy and astrology. His son, who was the first Earl of Cumberland, embittered the conclusion of his life, by embarking in a series of adventures, which, in spite of their profligacy, or rather in consequence of it, possess a very strong romantic interest. Finding that his father was either unwilling or unable to furnish him with funds to maintain his inordinate riot and luxury, he became the leader of a band of outlaws, and, by their agency, levied aids and benevolences upon the different travellers on the king's highway. A letter of the old lord, his father, which, by the by, is not the letter of an illiterate man, is still extant, in which he complains in very moving terms of his son's degeneracy and misconduct. The young scapegrace, wishing to make his father know from experience the inconvenience of being scantily supplied with money, enjoined his tenantry in Craven not to pay their rents, and beat one of them, Henry Popely, who ventured to disobey him, so severely with his own hand, that he lay for a long time in peril of death. He spoiled his father's houses, &c. "feloniously took away his proper goods," as the old lord quaintly observes, "apparelling himself and his horse, all the time, in cloth of gold and goldsmith's work, more like a duke than a poor baron's son." He likewise took a particular aversion to the religious orders, "shamefully beating their tenants and servants, in such wise as some whole towns were fain to keep the churches both night and day, and durst not come at their own houses."—Whilst engaged in these ignoble practices, less dissonant, however, to the manners of his age than to those of our's, he wooed, and won, and married, a daughter of the Percy of Northumberland; and it is conjectured, upon very plausible grounds, that his courtship and marriage with a lady of the highest rank under such disadvantages on his part, gave rise to the beautiful old ballad of the Nutbrown Maid. The lady, becoming very unexpectedly the heiress of her family, added to the inheritance of the Cliffords the extensive fee which the Percies held in Yorkshire; and by that transfer of property, and by the grant of Bolton Abbey, which he obtained from Henry the Eighth, on the dissolution of the monasteries, her husband became possessor of nearly all the district which stretches between the castles of Skipton on the south, and of Brougham, or as the Cliffords, to whom it belonged, always wrote it, Bromeham, on the north. The second Earl of Cumberland, who was as fond of alchemy and astrology as his grandfather, was succeeded by his son George, who distinguished himself abroad by the daring intrepidity with which he conducted several buccaneering expeditions in the West Indies against the Spaniards, and at home, by the very extensive scale on which he propagated his own and his Maker's image in the dales of Craven. Among the numerous children of whom he was the father, the most celebrated was the Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery, whose long life of virtuous exertion renders her well qualified to figure as the heroine of a tale of chivalry. The anecdotes which are told of this high-spirited lady in the three counties of York, Westmoreland, and Cumberland, are almost innumerable, and relate to circumstances in her life, which, though some are impossible, and others improbable, are still all full of heroic interest and adventure. Her defence of Bromeham Castle against the intrusion of her uncle of Cumberland,—her riding cross-legged to meet the judges of assize, when she acted in person at Appleby as High Sheriff by inheritance of the county of Westmoreland,—her hairbreadth escapes and dangers during the great rebellion, are characteristics of the woman, so striking in themselves, that they would require little adventitious ornament from the writer, who should take them as incidents for poem or romance. Her courage and liberality in public life were only to be equalled by her order, economy, and devotion in private. "She was," says Dr. Whitaker, "the oldest and most independent courtier in the kingdom," at the time of her death.—"She had known and admired queen Elizabeth;— she had refused what she deemed an iniquitous award of king James," though urged to submit to it by her first husband, the Earl of Dorset;— "She rebuilt her dismantled castles in defiance of Cromwell, and repelled with disdain the interposition of a profligate minister under Charles the Second." A woman of such dauntless spirit and conduct would be a fitting subject, even for the pencil of the mighty magician of Abbotsford. A journal of her life in her own hand-writing is still in existence at Appleby Castle. I have heard, that it descends to the minutest details about her habits and feelings, and that it is that cause alone, which prevents its publication.

Blackwood's Magazine.

A VILLAGE FUNERAL IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The sun was careering brightly in the heavens, and all nature was rejoicing in its unclouded glory, as the funeral procession of Helen Hartlington, and Antony Clifford, wound its toilsome and melancholy way to Bolton Abbey. The sportive Deer were bounding lightly over the hills, and the glad birds were warbling melodiously in the thickets, as if none but the living were moving amongst them; and but for the wild dirge, which mingled with the whispers of the wind, and but for the deep-toned knell which ever and anon rose slowly and mournfully above it, the lone traveller would never have conjectured that Death was conveying its victims through those smiling scenes. As the procession approached the portals of the Abbey, it was met, as was then customary, by the young men and maidens of the surrounding villages, in their best array, who hung upon the hearse chaplets of fragrant flowers, and strewed its path with rosemary, pansies, and rue. At the same moment the solemn chant of the Miserere thrilled upon the soul, and was succeeded, as it gradually melted into silence, by the still more affecting strains of the parting requiem for the dead—Ibid.

NOTES FROM THE QUARTERLY REVIEW—(JUST PUBLISHED.)

An old acquaintance of ours, as remarkable for the grotesque