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Nugae Antiquae - BISHOPS OF HEREFORD:

BISHOPS OF HEREFORD:


Doctor Robert Bennet.


            This bishop<432> was preferred to this place since my author wrote his catalogue, so as he is not therein specified; yet must not I do him that wrong to omit him in this relation. This is he (if your Highness do remember it) of whom his Majesty said, "if he were to choose a bishop by the aspect, he would choose him of all the men he had seen, for a grave, reverent, and pleasing countenance;" concurring herein, in a sort, though by contraries, with the judgement of Henry the fourth Emperor, who coming from hunting one day, (as Malmsbury writeth) went for devotion sake into a church, where a very ill-favoured faced priest was at service.—The Emperor thinking his virtues suted his visage, said to himself, "How can God like of so ugly a fellow's service.?" But it fortuned at that instant, the priests boy was mumbling of that versicle in the hundredth psalm, ipse nos fecit, et non ipsi nos;<433> and because he pronounced it not plainly, the priest reproved him, and repeated it again aloud, ipse nos fecit, et non ipsi nos: which the Emperor applying to his own cogitation, thought the priest to have some prophetical spirit, and from that time forward esteemed him greatly, and made him a bishop. Thus that bishop, though he could not set so good a face of it, yet he got perhaps as good a bishopric.

            But to come to our bishop, whom myself knew in Cambridge a Master of Art, and a proper active man, and played well at tennis; and after that, when he came to be a Bachelor of Divinity, he would toss an argument in the schools better than a ball in the tennis-court. A grave doctor yet living, and his ancient, alluding to his name in their disputation, called him Erudite Benedicte,<433> and gave him, for his outward as well as inward ornaments, great commendation. He became, after, chaplain to the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, who was very curious, and no less fortunate in the choice of his chaplains, and they no less happy in the choice of their patron, as Mr. Day, after bishop of Winchester; the bishop I now speak of; Doctor Neale, now dean of Westminster; and divers others.

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