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