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Full Title
The complete poetical works of William Wordsworth: together with a description of the country of the lakes in the north of England, now first published with his works ... / edited by Henry Reed.
Author
Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
Date Added
8 January 2014
Language
English
Publish Date
1839
Publisher
Philadelphia: J. Kay, Jun. and brother; Boston: J. Munroe and Co.; [etc., etc.]
Source
Woodstock Theological Center Library, Georgetown University.
Topic
Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. English poetry.
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OCR
POEMS OF THE IMAGINATION.
NOTES
TO
POEMS OF THE IMAGINATION.
Note 1, p. 152.
“Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,”
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honours in the first year of Henry the Seventh. It is
recorded that, “ when called to parliament, he behaved
nobly and wisely; but otherwise came seldom to Lon-
Henry Lord Clifford, &c. &c., who is the subject of don or the Court; and rather delighted to live in the
(this Poem, was the son of John Lord Clifford, who was country, where he repaired several of his Castles,
slain at Towton Field, which John Lord Clifford, as is which had gone to decay during the late troubles.”
~known to the Reader of English History, was the
Thus far is chiefly collected from Nicholson and Burn;
person who after the battle of Wakefield slew, in the’ and I can add, from my own knowledge, that there is
pursuit, the young Earl of Rutland, son of the Duke a tradition current in the village of Threlkeld and
of York, who had fallen in the battle, “in part of re-
venge” (say the Authors of the History of Cumberland
and Westmoreland) ; “ for the Earl’s Father had slain
its neighbourhood, his principal retreat, that, in the
course of his shepherd-life, he had acquired great
astronomical knowledge. I cannot conclude this note
his.” A deed which worthily blemished the author without adding a word upon the subject of those nume-
(saith Speed): but who, as he adds, ‘dare promise any , Tous and noble feudal Edifices, spoken of in the Poem,
thing temperate of himself in the heat of martial fury ? the ruins of some of which are, at this day,
so great
chiefly, when it was resolved not to leave any branch an ornament to that interesting country. The Cliffords
of the York line standing; for so one maketh this Lord
to speak.” This, no doubt, I would observe by the by,
was an action sufficiently in the vindictive spirit of the
times, and yet not altogether so bad as represented ;
“for the Earl was no child, as some writers would
have him, but able to bear arms, being sixteen or seven-
teen years of age, as is evident from this, (say the
Memoirs of the Countess of Pembroke, who was laud-
ably anxious to wipe away, as far as could be, this
stigma from the illustrious name to which she was
born,) that he was the next Child to King Edward the
Fourth, which his mother had by Richard Duke of
York, and that King was then eighteen years of age:
and for the small distance betwixt her Children, see
Austin Vincent, in his Book of Nobility, page 622.,
where he writes of them all.” “It may further be ob-
served, that Lord Clifford, who was then himself only
twenty-five years of age, had been a leading Man and
Commander, two or three years together, in the army
of Lancaster, before this time; and, therefore, would
be less likely to think that the Earl- of Rutland might
be entitled to mercy from his youth. — But, indepen-
dent of this act, at best a cruel and savage one, the
Family of Clifford had done enough to draw upon them
the vehement hatred of the House of York: so that
after the Battle of Towton there was no hope for them
but in flight and concealment. Henry, the subject of
the Poem, was deprived of his estate and honours during
the space of twenty-four years; all which time he
lived as a shepherd in Yorkshire, or in Cumberland,
where the estate of his Father-in-law (Sir Lancelot
Threlkeld) lay. He was restored to his estate and
had always been distinguished for an honourable pride
in these Castles; and we have seen that after the wars
of York and Lancaster they were rebuilt; in the civil
wars of Charles the First they were again laid waste,
and again restored almost to their former magnificence,
by the celebrated Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pem-
broke, &c. &c, Not more than twenty-five years after
this was done, when the estates of Clifford had passed
into the Family of Tufton, three of these Castles,
namely, Brough, Brougham, and Pendragon, were de-
molished, and the timber and other materials sold by
Thomas Earl of Thanet. We will hope that, when
this order was issued, the Earl had not consulted the
text of Isaiah, 58th chap, 12th verse, to which the in-
scription placed over the gate of Pendragon Castle, by
the Countess of Pembroke (I believe his Grandmother),
at the time she repaired ‘that structure, refers the
reader: “ And they that shall be of thee shall build
the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the founda-
tions of many generations ; and thou shalt be called
the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to
dwell in.” The Earl of Thanet, the present possessor
of the Estates, witha due respect for the memory of
his ancestors, and a proper sense of the value and
beauty of these remains of antiquity, has (I am told)
given orders that they shall be preserved from all de-
predations,
[This subject is again alluded to in Canto I. of ‘The
White Doe of Rylstone,’ p. 273, and in an additional
note (N. 16) attached to it. The story of “the Shep-
herd Lord” has so deep an interest that, at the hazard