was not himself the worst poet in England.

The castle keep was never to be held by a successor to Wither and
Denham. Sir William Waller blew up one of the walls when he took it from
Sir John, and the year before Charles was executed Parliament ordered it
to be dismantled altogether. The garrison fell to with enthusiasm,
stripped the building of all the lead, wood, and glass they could lay
their hands on, and sold the wreck to make up their back pay. At the
Restoration, when Bishop Duppa came to the See, he found the castle
almost uninhabitable. It cost him more than two thousand pounds to make
it fit to live in, and his successor, Bishop Morley, spent even more. He
actually laid out ten thousand pounds in improvements, only to meet with
John Aubrey's criticism that he had repaired the building "without any
regard to the rules of architecture." Doctor Peter Mew, who succeeded
Morley, set about improving the castle from outside, and planted the top
of the keep, into which the old walls had been tumbled, with fruit
trees. Bishop Sumner, who held the See for forty-two years from 1827,
turned the orchard into a garden.

Bishop Mew had a double record. He was a soldier as well as a prelate,
and he took part in the last battle fought on English soil. When King
Monmouth's Mendip miners were making their last stand at Sedgmoor, the
end of the fight came with the arrival of King James's artillery. The
heavy cannon might never have been drawn to the ground where the battle
was raging, for the artillery were unprovided with horses, had not the
Bishop offered his coach horses and traces. When they came to Sedgmoor,
he himself directed the fire.

The result of the various fortunes and misfortunes of the castle in war,
and of the different additions and alterations made by successive
Bishops, is naturally rather puzzling. The castle is a medley of the
building of eight centuries. Oldest of all is the ruined keep and the
framework, or foundations, of the castle buildings; the masonry of the
keep is the work of Henry of Blois, and belongs to the twelfth century.
Next come three pillars of the old chapel, now used as a servants' hall.
I saw it when it was set for a meal, and the severe cleanliness of the
white stone above the white tablecloth and glass and cutlery has
remained one of the distinctest of my memories of the castle. Next in
age is the outer gateway--doubtless the scene of Sir William Waller's
explosion--an imposing block