Note 7 — Chapter III
Reading edition
"Isn't it perfectly monstrous," Bute is recorded to have once asked a lady in a London drawing-room, à propos of nothing in particular, "that St. Magnus hasn't got an octave?" What the lady said or thought is not recorded, but Bute had the satisfaction of knowing, before his death, that Pope Leo XIII. had at least authorised the keeping of St. Magnus's festival throughout Scotland; The Scots Benedictine Abbey of Fort Augustus is probably the only place in Christendom where the feast-day of the holy Earl (April 16) is annually celebrated by a solemn high Mass.