Even before the Restoration the Harrogate
waters had become famous for curing
sick people. The company began to gather
there and lodging-houses sprang up, but
it was not till 1687 that the first public
house, on the site of the present "Queen,"
was built. Smollet came to Harrogate;
he was indeed fond of Yorkshire, and,
as the crow would remind his readers, has
fixed on Scarborough as the place where
Humphrey Clinker dragged out by the
ear his choleric master whom he fancied to
be drowning. Smellfungus, as Sterne calls
Smollet, who travelled "from Dan to
Beersheba," and declared all to be barren,
described the fashionable resort of Yorkshire
as "a wild common, bare and bleak,
without tree or shrub, or the slightest
signs of cultivation." Worthy but testy
Matthew Bramble (a type of Smollet himself),
sketches the frugal and simple-hearted
life then prevailing at the paradise of
invalids. The company mostly lodged at
four separate inns scattered over the bleak
common, and went every morning to the
well in their own carriages. From eight
o'clock till eleven there was a table-d'hôte
breakfast at each of the inns. The company
drank tea in the afternoon, and played cards
or danced in the evening. One custom
Smollet much condemned. The ladies were
obliged to treat the guests with tea alternately,
and even girls of sixteen were not
exempted from this shameful imposition.
There was a public subscription ball every
night at one or other of the inns, and the
company from the other houses were
admitted by tickets.

And now the crow darts forward to the
northern frontier of Yorkshire, and singles
out Rokeby—Scott's Rokeby—for his prey.
Scott visited his friend Morritt there in
1809. Writing to Ellis, the poet expatiates
on the beautiful scenery, especially at the
junction of those swift and beautiful rivers,
the Greta and the Tees, in a glen not unlike
Roslin. " Rokeby is," he writes, " one of the
most enviable places I have ever seen, as it
unites the richness and luxuriance of English
vegetation with the romantic variety
of glen, torrent, and copse which dignify
our northern scenery." The poem was
written in 1812, during all the confusion of
Scott's "flitting" from Ashestiel to Abbotsford.
The descriptions are singularly
faithful, and form an eternal guide-book to
the place. The poet has sketched the Tees
near Eggleston Abbey, where it flows over
broad smooth beds of grey marble, and
Mortham Tower, which is haunted by the
ghost of a headless lady. The junction of
the Tees and Greta has been both drawn by
Turner and described by Scott.

The scene of Bertram's interview with
Guy Denzil is the glen called "Brignall
Banks," below Scargill; the robbers' cave,
hard by, is still shown, quarried in the flagstone,
and Mr. Morritt tells us that he
observed Scott noting with extreme care
the plants (the throatwort, thyme, &c.) that
grew round the spot. The woods and
scaurs of Rokeby are the scene of the old
mock-romance (fifteenth century) of "the
Hunting of the Felon Sowe of Rokeby," by
the blundering and not too-brave friars of
Richmond:

         She was more than other three
         The grisliest beast that ere might be—
                  Her head was great and grey.
         She was bred in Rokeby Wood;
         There were few that thither goed
                  That came alive away.

And now far into Northumberland the
crow strikes, where from Brislee Tower
he sees beyond the vale of Whittingham
the blue cones of the Cheviots (twenty
miles distant), and through their blue
ravines glimpses of the Teviots. Then the
crow swoops down on Alnwick, which stands
square and defiant, like a thing of yesterday,
on the gentle slope shelving to the Alne.
Pure and smooth looks the moor-stone in its
battlements, and yet the castle has stood
the buffets of centuries, and has been
battered by Scotch cannon and crimsoned
with Scotch blood; rebel powder has often
blackened it, and military engines have
stormed at it. It was built by Eustace
Fitzjohn, a friend of Henry the First, and
an adherent of the Empress Maud, who
surrendered his new-built fortress to the
Scotch king to hold against Stephen.
This same staunch partisan, Eustace, was
eventually shot through by an arrow at the
siege of Barnard Castle. Alnwick was
through all the centuries a resting-place
for kings. John came here, and angered
the northern barons by his licentious
insolence; and, in their turns, Edward the
Third, Henry the Fourth, and Queen
Margaret, and Edward the Fourth. Several
of these monarchs, indeed, earned their
lodging by first capturing the castle,
which has a special Shakespearean interest
from its connexion with the chivalrous
Hotspur. A part of the castle between the
tower, called "Hotspur's Chair," and that
called the Record Tower, goes by the name
of the Bloody Gap, from a breach through
which the savage Scots once hotly entered,
and were as hotly driven back. A mere
record of the Earls of Northumberland is