The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commission has assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards--a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground. Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built and enlarged in the days when each See had its own income, and when the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees--and some were very poor--had Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were. "But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs. Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.