course of the Kent. In this mansion the reminiscence of Katherine Parr is kept up, not only in the name of the Queen's Room,' but in the rich counterpane and toilet cover, worked by her hands on a ground of white satin in brilliant colours and elaborate patterns. This, however, is not the only association of the place with the times of the Reformation. The Sizergh Stricklands were always Roman Catholic and firm in their attachment to the Stuarts, and among the pictures there attention will be particularly given to a fine portrait of Mary Queen of Scots. Finally, we descend to Levens, near the estuary of the Kent and the border of the sea, and notice its association with the Tudors, especially in its portraits of Anne Boleyn† and Queen Elizabeth. Few things are more striking than to view those two faces in succession,-the fresh, warm court-beauty and the old haggard Queen, and to trace or to imagine a resemblance between the young mother and the old daughter. This, perhaps, is the right place for saying a word concerning the Halls of Westmorland, which certainly form a distinguishing mark of the county. The main feature of these manor-houses was the great dining-hall, open to its roof of oaken woodwork, and with its panelled screen and minstrel's gallery at one end, and its dais and high table and oriel window at the other. Here the retainers slept on rushes, after the evening meal was over, and the lord and his family had retired for the night. The general form and character of these chambers is preserved nowhere else so perfectly as in the familiar dining-halls at Oxford and Cambridge. In the earlier time of which we speak, the lord's private chamber was placed over a strong vaulted cellar, and approached by a spiral stone staircase, which was continued upwards to the battlemented roof and the tower. These simple features may still be traced in several old Halls in the county; and especially it will generally be found that the vaulted cellar, built so strongly for safety against fire or attack, is now useful in another way, as providing a dairy of perfect coolness for butter and milk. As time went on, and feudal habits died out, and civilisation grew less simple, various changes took place in these halls. The retainers began now to occupy their separate dwellings. More bedrooms, too, were required. It became the custom also to have a separate diningroom for the lord and his family; and to this a withdrawing room was attached, and possibly also a boudoir for the lady. Thus the fine proportions of the dining-hall were invaded; and * A fine picture of Henry VII. himself is conspicuous at Levens. This picture was in the Collection at Kensington, and must have been looked at by multitudes with profound interest. especially especially we must notice that a floor was inserted, dividing it into an upper and lower chamber. We must add also the use of tapestry and of ornamental plaster work, and the more liberal employment of glass. Nor must we fail to take into account the outer enclosure of these residences, with its strong wall and large gateway. These various features and alterations can be studied in several examples scattered over the county. Our limits forbid our dwelling upon those of Yanwath, Middleton, Burneside, Kentmere, and Sizergh, or Wharton Hall, near Kirkby-Stephen. The tomb of Sir Thomas Wharton and his two wives in Kirkby-Stephen Church is one of the most observable sepulchral monuments in the county, while the strange life and early death of the brilliant and profligate Duke of Wharton, who closed the family history, is familiar to all through the lines of Pope. Of all these old manorial houses, none is to be compared, in present attractiveness and in unbroken traditions, with that of Levens. We ought, indeed, rather to say the two Halls connected with this name. For there are an Upper Levens and a Nether Levens, very sharply distinguished, though separated from each other only by the breadth of a few fields. At an early period these two Halls fell to different possessors, and the separation of the properties has ever since been tenaciously maintained. Since 1694, Nether Levens has belonged to the Wilsons of Dalham Tower, who obtained it from the Prestons. This Hall preserves its ancient form and dimensions very much unaltered; the great dais-window, if we may so call it, being the principal feature. Upper Levens, on the other hand, though we cannot say that it has been modernised, has been much enlarged at various times, so that it is a mansion of no inconsiderable grandeur, while nothing of its old-fashioned beauty has been lost. How long the benignant reign of Mrs. Howard at Levens has lasted may at once be gathered, when we say that she presented the colours to the Volunteers both of 1803 and 1860. The bugle horn of Sir James Bellingham and the initials of Colonel Graham mark severally their portions of the architectural work. But to the latter is due, more especially, that exquisite garden of Levens, without a mention of which no history of Westmorland could be complete. The history, too, of this garden is as unique as its beauty. Colonel Graham was closely associated with James II., and, when the King's inevitable flight took place, the royal gardener, M. Beaumont, a Frenchman, whose skill had previously been exercised at Hampton Court, came to Levens, and introduced into Westmorland that style of horticulture, which, beginning in Italy, had been brought to perfection under Louis XIV. at Versailles, 2 B 2 St. St. Germain's, and St. Cloud. Thus, while we wander in these formal shrubberies, we have around us the unchanged memorials of most momentous times, and of associations which bound, as it were, our English country life with all the Continent. In one of the letters which describe the formation of the garden, we have special mention of the 'greens,' by which are meant the hollies, box-trees, and yews, of the beeches, which are now fine trees, at the end of the garden nearest Heversham, -and of the limes, which must have been among the first planted in England, if (as we are informed by the Vicar of Crosby Ravensworth, to whom we are most indebted in our account of Levens *), these trees were introduced into England from Holland in the reign of William III. No one who has not visited this garden at different seasons can easily imagine how green it is in the snows of winter; how cheerfully calm and grave in the summer sunlight; how its stiff and dignified lines are in harmony with the architectural lines of the Hall; how charmingly its unchanging form preserves to us the memory of the olden times. In visiting these Halls, and noticing the changes in style and arrangement which took place in them during the social progress between 1500 and 1700, we are tempted to think of the various local events which must have been, during that interval, subjects of eager and excited conversation within their walls, such as the grand victory of Solway Moss, when a Westmorland gentleman, from one of these very Halls, at the head of a handful of Northcountry farmers, routed a whole undisciplined army of the Scotch, —or the terrible plague of 1598, which has left such marks on the parish registers, when Appleby market was taken to Cliburn, and the food for the starving members of the stricken families in Kendal was left upon a stone near Helm, far beyond the precincts of the town,-or the flood and storm of October, 1635, when consternation was spread through many families by the news that forty-seven persons were drowned in Windermere on their return from a merry-making at Hawkshead, †—or the gathering and dispersing of the royalists with no little bustle, if without much bloodshed, about a hundred years later,t-or such a fruitful subject for wonder and gossip, when the Civil War was over, as the wild adventure of Major Philipson, who for his 6 *The Rev. G. Weston, in a paper read at Levens in 1861, before the Kendal Literary and Scientific Institution, and since printed in a pamphlet. † Mr. Alderman Fisher, of Kendal, to whom many most interesting illustrations of local archæology are due, recently discovered the names of those who were drowned on this occasion, written in the neat but somewhat cramped handwriting of the time,' at the end of the earlier parish register at Grasmere. Some local elucidations of this subject are afforded by Mr. J. Whitwell of Kendal, in a paper read before the above-named Society in 1864. many many feats of personal bravery had obtained among the Oliverians of those parts the appellation of Robin the Devil,' and who, in revenge for having been besieged in his island of Windermere by one Briggs, a magistrate of Kendal, rode on horseback into the congregation of Kendal Church on a Sunday morning, and, failing to find his enemy, galloped off, after killing the man who cut his girths, to his safe castle near Bowness. But in dreaming over what may have passed in these Westmorland Halls (and certainly no place for such dreams can be more pleasant and suggestive than Levens) we have already floated into a new period of history; and we must now take a wider view of our subject. Through the biographies of its eminent persons, our county begins at this time to have a claim to be connected with the proceedings of the world at large. George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, and his no less distinguished daughter, carry us through the first half of the century. With the second half we come to the Lowthers and a period of very active political life, the varied interests of which are not very different from those of our own day. The third Earl of Cumberland is to be reckoned undoubtedly as one of the most eminent men of the county. He was born at Brougham Castle in 1552, and studied under Whitgift, not at Oxford (as Dr. Burn has it), but at St. Peter's College, Cambridge. He commanded a ship in the battle with the Armada. Before that time (in 1586) he had fitted out a fleet of ships, one of which was commanded by Raleigh. Afterwards he astonishes us by his varied adventures in almost every sea; and almost every sea was then beginning to be known. In character, so far as it was seen by the outward world, he was intrepid, patriotic, chivalrous, and disinterested; but he was profligate in his private life, and heartless in his treatment of his family. Even his daughter, who was remarkable for her filial piety, does not say that he was a good man, but only that he died 'penitently.' The daughter,—to whom we now turn,- Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset and Countess of Pembroke-is the noblest lady in the annals of Westmorland. Her domain extended to a vast distance over the northern hills of Westmorland, and down the eastern dales far into Yorkshire; and her memory is still cherished among those moors and valleys. Her life was full of trial, both in her married days and in her widowhood. The wife of two worthless husbands, she speaks of them, as might be expected, respectfully and patiently. Those two lords of mine, *We quote from Gilpin. The story is told in 'Rokeby.' to 6 The to whom I was by divine Providence married, were in their several kinds as worthy noblemen as any there were in this kingdom: yet,' she adds, 'it was my misfortune to have contradictions and crosses with them both;' and she concludes thus the passage we are quoting-'a wise man that knew the insides of my fortune would often say, that I lived in both these my lords' great families as the river Roan, or Rhodanus, runs through the lake of Geneva, without mingling any part of its stream with that lake; for I gave myself up wholly to retirement as much as I could in both these great families, and made good books and virtuous thoughts my companions, which can never discern affliction, nor be daunted when it unjustly happens; and by a happy genius I overcame all these troubles, the prayers of my blessed mother helping me therein.' This tender reverence for her mother was evidently one of the deepest and most abiding feelings of the Countess of Pembroke. Their lives had been bound together by similar experience of sorrow. biographer to whom we have referred says of the mother, that her marriage only deserved the name 'insomuch as it was sanctified by the pious submission of the most suffering party,'while he asserts of the daughter that she considered marriage as a necessary evil-a penalty of womanhood; and, expecting no felicity, suffered no disappointment.' Yet, with all this tenderness, there were stern features in Ann Clifford. She governed her estates with the royal strength and dignity of a great feudal ruler. She hated the Court, and said that if she went there at all she must go with blinkers.' Though a staunch royalist, she had a dignified sense of her own independence. Cromwell she thoroughly despised. 'What!' she said, 'does he imagine that I, who refused to submit to King James, will submit to him?' Yet Appleby Castle was forced to surrender to the Parliamentarians, with a large number of men and officers. From the time of the Restoration of the Monarchy begins her own diligent and loving restoration of her five famous castles of Brougham, Appleby, Pendragon, Brough, and Skipton. On all of them she seems to have put an inscription to the same effect, carefully describing herself as Sheriffesse by inheritance of the County of Westmorland,' referring with a kind of grim resentment to their demolition almost to the foundation, by the command of the Parliament then sitting in Westminster,' and ending with her favourite text, which was the 12th verse of the 58th chapter of Isaiah Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of places to dwell in.' Her life, too, was full of good works and charity. While repairing castles, she founded hospitals and rebuilt |