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 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