St. Nicholas ran through the ordinary course of those days. He became a monk, succeeded to the abbacy of his convent; and when the clergy of Myra assembled to elect a Bishop, and almost agreed in their choice, they were divinely instructed to wait till the next day, and then to choose the person who first offered himself to their notice, on their opening the church-door. They obeyed; and in the morning St. Nicholas was led to the spot by an irresistible impulse. He assisted in overthrowing the Arians, under the direction of Constantine, at the Council of Nice. All these, however, were matters of frequent occurrence. The fame of St. Nicholas rests on something more unusual; and if the tale is of a date sufficiently early, it may have been the cause of his subsequent advancement, and of his having obtained an influence so great as to effect the change of his simple bishoprick into a metropolitan see, with thirty-six suffragans. So very early was the _præcox ingenium_ of this saint directed towards observances, then deemed most acceptable to the Divinity, that when an infant in arms he rigidly abstained, every Wednesday and Friday, and on all other days kept as fasts by the church, from touching his nurse’s breast; for this truly wonderful ascetic achievement he has been deservedly accounted the peculiar patron of children, and more especially the preserver of their health. He died in 342, and was buried in the Cathedral at Myra; but in the year 1087 his relics were forcibly taken from a country no longer Christian, and were enshrined in the Cathedral of St. Stephen at Bavi in Italy, where pilgrims have ever since resorted in great numbers to witness or to experience miraculous cures effected by his intercession with Almighty God. His festival is kept on the 6th of December, and on this day the ludicrous or profane ceremony of the Boy Bishop used to be exhibited in most Cathedrals. At Salisbury a boy is represented on a monument, dressed in the habit of a bishop including the mitre; and this is said to have been occasioned by the lad dying in his mock pontificate. Mr. Lysons states, that the manor of Callington has passed through various families, Ferrers, Champernowne, Willoughby, Dennis, and Rolle. The heiress of Samuel Rolle brought it to Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, son of Sir Robert Walpole; and on the death of his son George Walpole in 1791, _sine prole_, this property passed to Mr. Robert George William Trefusis, of Trefusis in Cornwall, together with the barony of Clinton, created by writ of summons to Parliament in the reign of Edward the First.