Michael left only a daughter—Leonor or Leonora, who by marrying a distant cousin of the same name, preserved the estates in the family, as they had been for more than a century before they were inherited by her father. These remained in possession of the senior branch until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when, having espoused the Protestant cause, they were forced to sacrifice them and quit the country in 1685, with what ready money they could hastily get together. With this they purchased an estate in Norwich, England; from which in after generations several of the family went out to Canada, and among them the late Bishop of Quebec.
To him, likewise I have heard attributed the irreverent piece of wit alluded to by the Witness; but with equal injustice, as his son, the late Bishop of Quebec assured me. [241]
It is one of those sayings evidently made up for people whose names or position suit for hanging them on.
George Mountain, D.D., Archbishop of York, was a contemporary of Michael de Montaigne, and a scion of the same family, though through a younger branch, which appears to have crossed over from France about the time of the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and for the same reason that the elder branch did afterwards, namely, because of their religious tenets.
It is not by any means improbable that by this separation from the rest of his family, who were still adherents of the Roman Catholic faith, and the consequent abandonment of worldly prospects for the sake of religious principles, the Archbishop's progenitors may have been reduced in circumstances, but only comparatively with what he had lost before, for history shows that the Archbishop himself was, born at Callwood Castle, educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, chosen a Fellow in 1591, and Junior Proctor of that University in 1600, Dean of Westminster in 1610, Bishop of Lincoln in 1617, Bishop of London in 1621, Bishop of Durham in 1627, and Archbishop of York in 1628.
JACOB J. C. MOUNTAIN,
Formerly of Coteau de Lac, Canada, now Vicar of Bulford, England.
BULFORD VICARAGE, Amesbury, Salisbury, May 30, 1877.
BENMORE.
We like to portray to ourselves our energetic neighbour of Benmore House, such as we can recall him in his palmy, sporting days of 1865; we shall quote from the Maple Leaves of that year:
"It will not be one of the least glories of 'Our Parish,' even when the Province will have expanded into an empire, with Sillery as the seat of Vice Royalty, to be able to boast of possessing the Canadian, the adopted home of a British officer of wealth and intelligence, known to the sporting world as the Great Northern Hunter. Who had not heard of the battues of Col. Rhodes on the snow-clad peaks of Cap Tourment, on the Western Prairies, and all along the Laurentian chain of mountains? One man alone through the boundless territory extending from Quebec to the North Pole, can dispute the belt with the Sillery Nimrod, but then, a mighty hunter is he; by name in the St. Joachim settlement, Olivier Cauchon, to Canadian sportsmen known as Le Roi des Bois. It is said, but we cannot vouch for the fact—that Cauchon, in order to acquire the scent, swiftness and sagacity of the cariboo, has lived on cariboo milk, with an infusion of moss and bark, ever since his babyhood, but that this very winter (1865) he killed, with slugs, four cariboo at one shot, we can vouch for.