GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
the time of his successor Robinson, who had no taste for botany 
or horticulture, the gardener was allowed to dispose of the greater 
part of the botanical treasures to some nurseryman at Fulham, to 
permit which was a terrible act of vandalism. But, if Bishop 
Robinson failed to realize his responsibilities towards the beautiful 
moated garden left to his care by his predecessor, he did a good 
work for the old palace itself. In 1615 he presented a petition 
to the Archbishop of Canterbury, stating that the Manor House 
of Fulham had grown very old and ruinous, and was much too 
large for the revenues of the bishopric, and that a great part of 
the building was becoming useless. Sir Christopher Wren and 
Sir John Vanbrugh were called in to examine and make a report. 
The result was that a number of rooms were condemned as un- 
necessary, and permission was granted to pull them down. After 
doing so there were still left fifty or sixty rooms in addition to 
the chapel, hall, and garden. But whatever the work of demolition 
may have done actually to improve the property, the restoration 
cannot have been carried very far, for in 1749 Bishop Sherlock 
wrote : “I find this a bad old house; I must repair a great deal, 
and, I am afraid, rebuild some part.” 
A touch of romance gilds the biography of Bishop Terrick, who 
died in 1771, but not before he had rebuilt the river front of the 
house. He had a daughter with whom Nicholas Ryder, son of 
the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, fell in love; but 
Nicholas, by the terms of his father’s will, might not marry any- 
one who had not a portion of ten thousand pounds, and this the 
lady did not possess. To get over the difficulty the lover sent 
the bride that sum of money as a wedding-gift. 
A remarkable feature of the gardens is the moat before mentioned, 
by which they are surrounded. It is nearly a mile long, and in 
many places twenty feet wide, at high water. By a moat we now 
understand a ditch filled with water, but the word, taken from 
the old French mote or motte, and meaning a lump or clod of earth, 
did not originally refer to the ditch itself, but to the mound of 
earth or mud thrown up in excavating it, and is a curious example 
of a reversal of an original meaning. Before the time of Bishop 
King—he whom James I. designated ‘‘ King of Preachers ”—there 
was no water in the moat except what percolated through the 
river bank. It must, therefore, have been in a chronic state of 
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