Note 65 — IX

Lewis Beaumont, an illiterate French nobleman, made bishop of Durham in 1330, was so inexpert at reading, that he could not read the bulls written for his people at his consecration. The word metropoliticæ occurred: the bishop paused, tried in vain to repeat it, and at last said, “Let us suppose that read.” Then he came to the word ænigmate, before which he stopped in a fine wrath, and said, “By St. Lewis, he was no gentleman who wrote this stuff.” . . . . At an entertainment given at Rome, during the same century, by the bishop of Murray, the papal legate from Scotland, the bishop so blundered in his Latin when he was saying grace, that his holiness and the cardinals could not refrain from laughing. The disconcerted bishop testily concluded in Scotch-English, by wishing “all the false carles to the devil,” to which the company, who did not understand the dialect, unwittingly responded, Amen.