When North had raised himself to the Chiefship of the Common Pleas he chose the Western Circuit, "not for the common cause, it being a long circuit, and beneficial for the officers and servants, but because he knew the gentlemen to be loyal and conformable, and that he should have fair quarter amongst them;" and so much favor did he win amongst the loyal and conformable gentry that old Bishop Mew--the prelate of Winchester, popularly known as Bishop _Patch_, because he always wore a patch of black court-plaster over the scar of a wound which he received on one of his cheeks, whilst fighting as a trooper for Charles I.--used to term him the "Deliciae occidentis, or Darling of the West." On one occasion this Darling of the West was placed in a ludicrous position by the alacrity with which he accepted an invitation from "a busy fanatic," a Devonshire gentleman, of good family, and estate, named Duke. This "busy fanatic" invited the judges on circuit and their officers to dine and sleep at his mansion on their way to Exeter, and subsequently scandalized his guests--all of them of course zealous defenders of the Established Church--by reading family-prayers before supper. "The gentleman," says the historian, "had not the manners to engage the parish minister to come and officiate with any part of the evening service before supper: but he himself got behind the table in his hall, and read a chapter, and then a long-winded prayer, after the Presbyterian way." Very displeased were the Chief Justice and the other Judge of Assize; and their dissatisfaction was not diminished on the following day when on entering Exeter a rumor met them, that "the judges had been at a conventicle, and the grand jury intended to present them and all their retinue for it."