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‘Mummies were of several kinds,’ we learn, ‘and all were of great use in magnetic medicines. Paracelsus enumerates six kinds of mummies: the first four, only differing in the composition used by different peoples for preserving their dead, are the Egyptian, Arabian, Hirasphatos, and Libyan. The fifth mummy of peculiar power was made from criminals that had been hanged, for from such there is a gentle siccedion, that expungeth the watery humours without destroying the oil and spirituall which is cherished by the heavenly luminaries, and strengthened continually by the affluence and impulses of the celestial spirits, whence it may be called by the name of constellated or celestial mummy. The sixth kind of mummy was made of corpuscles or spiritual effluences radiated from the living body; though we cannot get very clear ideas on this head, respecting the manner in which they were caught.’ (Medicine, Disuetatica, or Sympathetica, from Paracelsus.) Our first spiritual effluences, our first mummy-made medicine, shall be physic made from those who showed their eccentricity by their unnatural persistence in retaining the appearance of life, and from those who, whilst in this life, mimic’d mortality.

Of these two strongly opposed races of the Dead, the first was deeply affected by the moon. At every waxing or waning of the moon over the countryside, a faint whispering as of drowsy complaining nightingales might be heard, for the ancients were dying under the strange influence of the moonlight. Some were brightening into eternal glory with the full moon, others were waning and being born again with the new moon, whilst their ancient dust sank into a mossy green fresh grave. For the planet has a strange influence. Ambrose Paré believed that the danger of contagion from the plague is nearer to all men at the time of the full moon, whilst, according to Pliny, the fourth day of the moon determines the wind of the month. The growth of the moon, if we may believe Gellius, enlarges the eyes of cats, and onions bud at the decrease of the moon, and wither whilst she grows—a sinister and unnatural vegetation which induced the people of Pelusium to avoid their use. Ants, we are told by Pliny, never perform their work whilst the moon is about to change. Aristotle is convinced that the time for earthquakes is when the new moon is born, and that under the strange and drowsy influence of this light (which is nourished by the sound and the ripples of rivers, as the sun draws its strength from the sea), those sleepers who lie beneath its beams grow drowsier still, whilst the moon corrupts all slain carcasses she shines upon. He is confirmed in this matter by Van Helmont, who assures us that a wound inflicted by moonlight is most difficult to heal. Shepherds must pray to the moon, for according to Galen ‘all animals that are born when the moon is falciform, or at the half-quarter, are weak, feeble, and short-lived, whereas those that are dropped at the full moon are healthy and vigorous’.

In the house in the wood, where the moonlight shines green through the leaves, and there is no sound excepting for the little drowsy household noises dying away into silence, the cook will warn you that meat hung in the moonlight soon becomes rotten. Far away, amongst other and very different trees, wild races, the Arabs and the Egyptians and the Negroes in the West Indies, fear sleeping in the moonlight. Many a careless Negro, if we may believe Lieutenant Burton, after sleeping under the light of the full moon, has risen to find that one half of his face is by no means the same colour as the other half of his face; nor does this strange metamorphosis fade with the moon; on the contrary, many months must pass before both sides of that dark face are of the same colour once more. With these records of the moon’s evil influence in our mind, we cannot be surprised that the researches of a certain Dr Moseley led him to the conclusion that persons in extreme old age wane into death at the time of the full or the new moon.

Amongst other aged quivering nightingale-like voices complaining from the white nodding cottages on this drowsy night of the full moon, we may hear the ghosts of the bones of old Mr John de la Smet, who died, aged one hundred and thirty years, in 1766; of Mr George King, aged also one hundred and thirty years, who died at the same time; of Mr John Taylor, whose age was the same, and who died in 1767; of Mr William Beattie whose death took place in 1774; Mr John Watson who died in 1778; Mr Robert MacCride, who died in 1780; and Mr William Ellis who trembled into dust in 1780. All these ancient persons reached the age of one hundred and thirty years, and then sank into a greenish dust under the light of the full moon, whilst Mr Peter Garden lived to the age of one hundred and thirty-one, and died in 1775. Mrs Elizabeth Merchant died at the age of one hundred and thirty-three, in 1761; Mrs Catherine Noon, white and ghostlike, faded in 1763, at the age of one hundred and thirty-six. Mr William Leland, and the ancient Countess of Desmond, died in 1732, aged one hundred and forty, and old Mrs Louisa Trusco beat the lot by crumbling into dust at the age of one hundred and seventy-five, in the year 1780.

I am told that the eighteenth century was remarkable for the age and darkness of the full-leaved shady mulberry trees and fig trees, and it may be that this century was fortunate also in bringing its ancients into a sleepy plenitude of time. But there was an earlier shady old person named Thomas Parr, who was, I believe, painted by Rubens when he was a hundred and forty years old, whose age and prowess was celebrated in verse by John Taylor, the water poet, and who died on the 15th of November, 1635, at the age of one hundred and fifty-two. In spite of the unsuitable sprightliness of his later years, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

John Taylor tells us that ‘the Right Hon. Thomas Earl of Arundel and Surrey, Earl Marshal of England, etc., being lately in Shropshire to visit some lands and manors which his lordship holds in that country, or for some other occasions of importance, the report of this aged man was certified to his honour, who, hearing of so remarkable a Piece of Antiquity, his lordship was pleased to see him, and in his innate, noble and Christian piety, he took him into his charitable tuition and protection; commanding a litter and two horses (for the more easy carriage of a man so enfeebled and worn with age) to be provided for him; also, that a daughter-in-law of his (named Lucy) should likewise attend him, and have a horse of her own riding with him; and to cheer up the old man, and make him merry, there was an antique-faced fellow, called Jack, or John the Fool, with a high and mighty no-beard, that had also a horse for his carriage. These were all to be brought out of the country to London by easie journeys, the charges being allowed by his lordship; and likewise one of his honour’s own servants, named Brian Kelly, to ride on horseback with them, and to attend and defray all manner of reckoning and expenses; all which was done accordingly.’

The journey was not by any means devoid of incident, for the ‘rabble’ was so intent on seeing the Piece of Antiquity that he was nearly smothered. We hear that ‘at Coventry he was most opprest; for they came in such multitudes to see the old man, that those who defended him were almost quite tyred and spent, and the aged man in danger to have been stifled’. However, after several excitements of this kind, the cortège reached London.

Mr Parr married for the first time when he was eighty; and marriage after that became a habit with him, though there was an occasion when, owing no doubt to an oversight, he was made to do public penance, at the age of one hundred and five, for omitting this ceremony. The ghostlike Piece of Antiquity, fading like the moon in summer daylight stood, on this occasion, wrapped in a white sheet at the church door. But I am afraid the ancient and rattling-boned gallant rather gloried in this fall from grace, for he certainly boasted about it to King Charles I. Afterwards, he married again, this time at the age of a hundred and twenty, and his wife, whose maiden name was Catherine Milton, presented him with a child. He was, at that time of his life, ‘employed in threshing and other husbandry work’, and his portrait shows a rather noble windformed head and beard—the face, indeed, of a sylvan Jupiter, wrinkled and brown like the trunk of a fig tree.

Two other remarkable ancients were the Countess of Desmond, whose death, at the age of one hundred and forty years, seems to have been less the result of age, or even of the full moon, than the result of climbing an apple tree—and falling from this, amidst a shower of glistening apples; and Mr Henry Jenkins, who died in 1670, at the age of one hundred and sixty-nine.

In spite of his remarkable career, Mr Jenkins had, perhaps from fatigue, elected to die, humbly on the day of the new moon, instead of surrounded by the splendours of the full moon. Mrs Anne Saville, of Bolton, Yorkshire, who knew him well, remembered that one day when this venerable person came to beg from her, he confided in her that he remembered the Battle of Flodden Field with great distinctness. King Henry VIII was not there, he informed the tongue-tied Mrs Saville, for he was in France; the Earl of Surrey was General. When Mrs Saville recovered from the not unnatural astonishment into which she was thrown by this confidence on the part of Mr Jenkins, she asked for more details about Flodden Field and Mr Jenkins’ age at the time of the battle. ‘I was between ten and twelve,’ that remarkable old gentleman assured her, ‘for I was sent to Northallerton with a horse-load of arrows, but they sent a bigger boy from thence to the army with them.’

As the battle of Flodden Field was fought on September the ninth, 1513, and Mr Jenkins was now approaching his death, which took place on December the eighth, 1670, Mrs Saville felt she would like to inquire into the truth of Mr Jenkins’ memories. Might they not, indeed, have been born from some trance of age, some sleep like death? But, in the course of her inquiries, she discovered that four or five ancient men of the same period, all of whom were over a hundred years of age, remembered Mr Jenkins when they were boys of a bird’s-nesting age; and he was already an extremely aged person when they knew him first. Mr Jenkins’ activities, it seemed, were many: he was, for instance, an extremely lively and garrulous witness in a law case between Messrs. Smithson and Anthony Clark at Kettering in the year 1665, when he, Mr Jenkins, was a labourer of the age of one hundred and fifty-seven years. And his biographer tells us, in an ecstasy of admiration, that this vivacious old person spent the last century of his life as a fisherman, and might frequently have been seen swimming in the rivers, with his beard spreading like weeds among the ripples.

These, then, are our ‘mummies made medicine’, who now are dying, nodding away into nothingness, in the calm light of the full moon. No longer can they be soothed into sleep, or lulled into an ever more peaceful dream, by medicines more ancient than themselves—such as the thousand-year-old Arabian draught,^[1] made of ‘Cinnamon, common pepper, juice of poppies, dried roses, water germander, rape seed, Illyrian iris, agaric, opobalsam, myrrh, saffron, ginger, rhaponticum, cinquefoil, calamint, horehound, stone parsley, cassidary, costus, white and long pepper, dittany, flowers of sweet rush, male frankincense, turpentine, mastrich, black cassia, spikenard, flowers of poley, storax, parsley seed, shepherd’s pouch, bishopsweed, ground pine, juice of hypocristus, Indian leaf, spignel, gentian, anise, Jenvel seed, Lemmian earth, roasted calchetis, amomum, sweet flag, balsamum, Pontic valerian, St John’s wort, acacia, carrot seed, galbanum, sagapen, bitumen, aposonax, castor, centaury, clematis, attic honey, and Falernian wine’. Even this recipe, nearly as long as the years they had passed, could not save them, nor could they be cured of the Melancholy and the Falling Evil by the use of figs, so strongly recommended by Dr Boleyn, that relative of the late Queen Anne Boleyn, who practised in the reign of Queen Mary and advocated the use of these fruits in his Book of Simples. For the ancients were as mummy-like as the sweet, overripe, and shrunken figs, and their sinews, shrunken by age, could not have their strength renewed by this prescription, given in the Book of Knowledge (1687): ‘Take young swallows out of their nests, by number twelve, rosemary tops, bay leaves, lavender tops, strawberry leaves, of each a handful: cut off the long feathers of the swallows’ wings and tails, put them into a stone mortar, and lay the herbs upon them, and beat them into pieces, guts, feathers, bones and all; then mix them with three pounds of hogs’ grease, and set it in the sun a month together, then boil it up and strain it and keep the ointment, and anoint the place grieved.’ In vain, too, had these ancient persons eaten swallows, which according to the Pharmacopoeia of 1654 clear the sight like fresh dew falling upon the eyes.

These remedies were useless to them, and so were the remedies administered to their Saxon grandfathers a thousand years ago, for such disabilities as ‘wens at a man’s heart’, which were cured by cucumbers and radish, and the small rape, and garlic and southernweed, and cinquefoil and pepper, and honey unsodden; or ‘warty eruptions’, which were cured by the following recipes: according to the first prescription you must ‘make several little wafers, such as a man offereth with, and write these names on each wafer: “Maximanus, Malchus, Johannes, Martianus, Dionysius, Constantinus, Serefian”; then again, one must sing to charm, which is hereinafter mentioned, first into the left ear, then into the right ear, then above the man’s poll; then let one who is a maiden go to him and hang it upon his neck, do so for three days, it will soon be well with him.’ If you were unconvinced by the efficacy of this prescription, you might ‘wring the nethermost part of cowslip and of hollow fumitory into the nostrils, and make the man lie on his back for a good while’.

These remedies were of no use to Mr Jenkins and Mr Parr and those other ancients who had passed a century of life. But still, in dark caves in the forests, and small white cottages amidst a world of orchard leaves, simple-gatherers are compounding remedies for those rare cases where women grow dumb from any cause but death—taking pennyroyal and rubbing it into dust, winding it into wool and laying it under the woman; whilst, for dim eyes, they took green rue, pounded it small, washed it with ‘dumbledores’ ’ (humble-bees’) honey, and lay it on the eyes. As for those unfortunate persons who suffered from ‘ill humours on the neck’, the wise women took halswort and woodmarch, the wild chervil and strawberry plants, and stitchwort and tree holly, and broad bishopsweed and brown wort, all these were gathered for three nights ‘before summer came to town; of each one equally much’, then, according to the directions, the patient must ‘work them to a drink in foreign ale’, and then, on the night when summer comes to town, he ‘having stayed awake all night’ (for reasons known to the inventor of this recipe alone) ‘may drink the first draught, and the second, as he heard the first cock crow’. He must then remain in a state of suspense, and, I presume, wakefulness, for a day and a half, and ‘on the blessed rising of the sun’ take a third dose. After that, we are told, ‘let him rest himself’.

It was, as we may see, a strenuous matter to preserve health and life to the age of a hundred and fifty years in the midst of such prescriptions as these, and such country dangers as those brought about by birds, who, at any moment, might fly into your window, seize a golden or a silver hair from your head, and build a nest from this. Anything might happen as a consequence of this theft, for ill fortune was the inevitable result and death a frequent result.

Nor were birds, or wens, or humours on the neck, and unaccountable dumbness in women, the only dangers which must be avoided, the only disorders which must be cured, for groundsel, is seems, would put the gout to flight, even if it raged like a fire, whilst peony was an infallible cure for lunacy. Wood chervil, again, proved very useful if an evil man, through spite, had enchanted another; whilst the herb heraclea, should one wish to make a long journey through dark woods, averted any danger of an attack of robbers.

In the lonely houses on the edge of the forests, the housekeeper and the chattering maids were chanting the following spell against thieves, whilst the household noises died down, and there was no light but one fluttering candle:

Tho sains the house the night,

They that sains it ilk or might.

Saint Bryde and her brate,

Saint Colne and his hat,

Saint Michael and his spear,

Keep the house from the weir;

From running thief,

And burning thief;

And from a’ ill rea

That be the gate can gae.

And from an ill wight

That be the gate can light,

Nine reeds about the house

Keep it all the night.

What is that what I see

So red, so bright, beyond the sea?

’Tis He was piercèd through the hands,

Through the feet, through the throat,

Through the tongue,

Through the liver and the lung;

Well is them that may

Fast on Good Friday.^[2]

Strangely enough, whilst the virtuous inhabitants of the houses in the wood were quaking and saying their prayers, the very robbers, against whose depredations they were interceding, were holding a prayer-meeting of their own on the moors, for they believed that they, too, were created for their own purpose, and had as much right to a well-fed life, as have wolves, or company-promoters, or any other living beings who are dependent upon their own efforts and the sweet trustfulness of sheep.

The prayer they chanted was this:

He that ordains us to be born

Send us more meat for the morn;

Part of t’ right and part of t’ wrong,

God never let us fast over long.

God be thanked, and our Lady,

All is done that we had ready.

Whilst these persons of varying respectability were trying, in their several ways, to preserve their lives, others, equally, or more, praiseworthy, were trying to escape the consequences of being alive. And, in aid of this praiseworthy desire, certain noblemen and country squires were advertising for Ornamental Hermits. Nothing, it was felt, could give such delight to the eye, as the spectacle of an aged person with a long grey beard, and a goatish rough robe, doddering about amongst the discomforts and pleasures of Nature.

The Honble Charles Hamilton, whose estate was at Pains’ Hall, near Cobham, Surrey, and who lived in the reign of King George II, was one of these admirers of singularity and silence, and, having advertised for a hermit, he built a retreat for this ornamental but retiring person on a steep mound in his estate.

This hermitage annoyed Mr Horace Walpole, who announced that it was ridiculous to set aside a quarter of one’s garden to be melancholy in: and, indeed, the retreat seems to have been remarkable more for its discomfort than for its beauty, for we learn that there was ‘an upper apartment, supported in part by contorted legs and roots of trees, which formed the entrance to the cell’. Still, Mr Hamilton seems to have found no difficulty in procuring the hermit; and in any case, a professional discomfort was only to be expected by the hermit, who, according to the terms of the agreement, must ‘continue in the hermitage seven years, where he should be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for his timepiece, water for his beverage, and food from the house. He must wear a camlet robe, and never, under any circumstances, must he cut his hair, beard, or nails, stray beyond the limits of Mr Hamilton’s grounds, or exchange one word with the servant.’ If he remained without breaking one of these conditions, in the grounds of Mr Hamilton for seven years, he was to receive, as a proof of Mr Hamilton’s admiration and satisfaction, the sum of seven hundred pounds. But if, driven to madness by the intolerable tickling of the beard, or the scratching of the camlet robe, he broke any of the conditions laid down, he was not to receive a penny! It is a melancholy fact that the Ornamental Hermit stayed in his retreat for exactly three weeks!

But a gentleman living near Preston, Lancashire, had better luck with his hermit. He had advertised in the papers, offering a salary of £50 a year for life, to any man who would live for seven years underground, without seeing any human being, and without cutting his hair, beard, toe-nails, or finger-nails. The advertisement was answered immediately, and the happy advertiser prepared an apartment underground which, as Mr Timbs assures us, was ‘very commodious, with a cold bath, a chamber organ, as many books as the occupier pleases, and provisions served from the gentleman’s own table’. The ornamental occupant bloomed, unseen, in this retreat for the space of four years. But, unseen as he was, it is a little difficult to guess what pleasure his employer can have got out of the matter.

The aged were not alone in answering these advertisements, or inserting advertisements of their own; for the following notice appeared in the Courier for January the eleventh, 1810: ‘A young man, who wishes to retire from the world and live as a hermit, in some convenient spot in England, is willing to engage with any nobleman or gentleman who may be desirous of having one. Any letter directed to S. Laurence (post paid), to be left at Mr Otton’s, No. 6 Coleman Lane, Plymouth, mentioning what gratuity will be given, and all other particulars, will be duly attended.’

The mention of the gratuity sounds a little mercenary, and I do not know what answers Mr S. Laurence received. Nor do I know what was the social position of an Ornamental Hermit. But I do know that in Blackwood’s Magazine for April, 1830, Mr Christopher North, in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, informs us (I dare not think in what spirit or for what reasons) that the editor of a certain other magazine had been ‘for fourteen years hermit to Lord Hill’s father, and sat in a cave in that worthy baronet’s grounds with an hourglass in his hand, and a beard belonging to an old goat, from sunrise to sunset, with orders to accept no half-crowns from visitors, but to behave like Giordano Bruno’.

It is not, I am sorry to say, impossible that this inspiration on the part of Mr North arose from reading the correspondence in Notes and Queries for 1810, wherein a gentleman relates that, on visiting Sir Richard Hill’s country seat at Hawkstone, he had been shown the hermitage there, inhabited by a stuffed figure dressed in the proper professional robe of an Ornamental Hermit, the whole scene being illuminated by the dimmest of lights.

But this is a painful subject, and it is pleasant to turn to a certain unpaid Ornamental Hermit, an aged person whose name is unknown, but who might have been seen tottering about his garden, in the village of Newton Burgsland, near Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, any day during the year 1863, and for fifteen years previously. This Ornamental Hermit was not a professional, but an amateur; he was his own master, and, I regret to say, lived comfortably, enjoyed a good dinner, a glass of beer, and a pipe; yet, in spite of these blots on his character as a hermit, he claimed that he was entitled to the name, as ‘True Hermits, throughout the ages, have been the abettors of freedom’; and it must be said that he conformed to the hermit ideal in sporting a very venerable appearance, and a long white beard. This ancient body was incurably interested in symbolization, and carried this interest so far that he possessed twenty hats, and twelve suits of clothes, in order that each might ‘bear a strange device’.

These suits and hats were all addressed, with proper respect, by names bestowed upon them by their owner, and I cannot do better than give the reader a few examples of both names and emblems.

NO.	NAME	EMBLEM OR MOTTO
1	Odd Fellows	Without money, without friends, without credit
5	Bellows	Blow the flames of freedom with God’s word of truth
7	Helmet	Will fight for the birthright of conscience, love, life, property, and national independence
13	Patent Teapot	To draw out the flavour of the tea best—Union and goodwill
17	Wash-Basin of Reform	White-washed face and collyed heart
20	Bee-Hive	The toils of industry are sweet; a wise people live at peace

The shapes of the hats were intended to mirror, to express, to symbolize, not only the proper names of the hats, but the Eternal Truths contained in the Emblems or Mottoes. The Suits of Clothes were not less important than the Hats. ‘Odd Fellows’, for instance, was of white cotton or linen, and was not tight-fitting; it hung loosely on the contrary, excepting where it was bound rather tightly round the waist with a white girdle which was tied in front. The left breast of this remarkable confection was adorned with a heart-shaped badge, inscribed with the motto ‘Liberty of Conscience’. It must not be supposed, for a moment, that the hat ‘Odd Fellows’ may be confounded with this dress. The hat worn with the dress ‘Odd Fellows’ was nearly white, and its actual shape did not arouse excitement, for attention had to be drawn to the Mottoes, which were not one, but four, and bound with black ribbon. The first device bore the words ‘Bless feed’, the second ‘Good Allowance’, the third ‘Well Clothed’, the fourth ‘All Working Men’.

You may imagine the sensation aroused by these aspirations expressed in millinery.

Other hats and costumes worn by this old gentleman were equally startling, though less improving to the character of the beholder. The costume ‘Foresters’, for instance, was undertaken in the lightest spirit, and was ‘expressed’, as dressmakers put it, in soft brown leather, slightly embroidered with braid. The shape was more or less like that of a frock coat, and this confection was closed down the front with white buttons, bound round the waist with a white girdle, and fastened with a white buckle. With this costume, the old gentleman wore a hat which bore some slight resemblance to a turban, and was divided into black and white stripes, chasing each other in a wilderness of ever-diminishing tiny circles—until they reached nothingness.

This ancient and respectable person did not confine his advertisements of the Virtues, and to quote Mr Timbs’ rather unsympathetic summing up of the matter, ‘mania for symbolisation’, to his dress. No, his garden, which was his most treasured possession, was one mass of these advertisements and symbols. Again I find myself quoting from Mr Timbs, for the reason that it would be impossible to express the state of the garden in terms more concise than his:

‘The passage leading into the garden’, Mr Timbs tells us, ‘was the “Three Seats of Self-Enquiry”, each inscribed with one of these questions: “Am I vile?” “Am I a Hypocrite?” “Am I a Christian?” Among the emblems and mottoes which were marked by different-coloured pebbles or flowers were these: “The Vessels of the Tabernacle”, “The Christian’s Armour—Olive Branch, Baptismal Font, Breastplate of Righteousness, Shield of Faith, etc.”, “Mount Pishap”, a circle enclosing the motto “Eternal Love has wed my Soul”, “a Bee-Hive”, “A Church”, “Sacred Urn”, “Universal Grave”, “Bed of Diamonds”, “A Heart enclosing the Rose of Sharon”, etc. All the implements included in Gardening: “The Two Hearts”, “Bowers”, “The Lover’s Prayer”, “Conjugal Bliss”, “The Hermit’s Coat of Arms”, “Gossip’s Court”—with motto, “Don’t tell Anybody”. “The Kitchen Walk” contained representation of culinary utensils, with mottoes—“Feast Square”, “Venison Pasty”, “Round of Beef”, etc.; whilst “The Odd Fellows Square” sported “The Henpecked Husband put on Water Gruel”, and “The Oratory” contained such mottoes as “The Orchestry”, “God save our Noble Queen”, “Britons never shall be Slaves”, “The Sand Glass of Time”, “The Assembly Room”, “The Wedding Walk”, “The Holy Mount”, “Noah’s Ark”, “Rainbow”, “Jacob’s Ladder”, “The Bank of Faith”, “The Saloon”, “The Enchanted Ground”, “The Exit”.’

I must confess that I find the description of this virtuous old gentleman’s garden as bewildering as his ideals; but it seems certain that he wished to give pleasure as well as moral instruction. Amiable and charitable, there was but one person on earth whom he disliked, and that was the Pope. His garden, therefore, was adorned not only by the arbours and mottoes that I have mentioned, and by images of the Apostles, but, as well, by ‘representations of the Inquisition and Purgatory, and mounds covered by sweet-smelling flowers in memory of the Graves of Protestant Martyrs and Reformers’. In the centre of these exhortations to religious meditation, the Hermit had placed a large tub with a very odd-looking desk just before it which served him as pulpit and lectern. It is not surprising, on the whole, that his aspect and views attracted a certain amount of respectful attention, and a large crowd; and, when the crowd was large enough, the centre of attention would climb, in a sprightly manner, into the pulpit, and would address the multitude on such subjects as the Pope, who, according to the speaker, was Antichrist and the enemy of humanity. Indeed, he went so far as to raise a mock gallows in his garden, adorned by an image of the Pope, dressed in a queer garb, and dangling amongst many books advocating Popery.

Far away in this strange garden, with its wildernesses of darkness, and mad dazzling hour-long summer lights masquerading as flowers, the Hermit passed his days. But alas, in the end, he grew poor, his career as an Ornamental Hermit was over, and he fades from our sight. So we must pass to another Ornamental Hermit, and one who was even less professional than the last.

The Hermit in question was Mr Matthew Robinson, afterwards Lord Rokeby, and he became famous for his amphibious habits, and for possessing benevolence and a beard. This gentleman of long life and virtuous habits, who was born in 1712, was the son of Mr Septimus Robinson, a gentleman-usher to King George II, and was the brother of the enchanting Mrs Elizabeth Montagu and Mrs Sarah Scott. He seems to have had only one fault—the vice of reciting to visitors in the most voluminous manner.

Lord Rokeby’s character differed very widely from that of his sisters. Lord Rokeby was an Ornamental Hermit, adorning Nature. Mrs Montagu and Mrs Scott adorned Society. Lord Rokeby enjoyed watching birds floating freely in his woods and parks; Mrs Montagu, though she loved all birds and animals when they were living, liked, too, to see the feathers of these birds, bright, light, and glancing as her own wits, adorning her drawing-room. Peacocks, pheasants and jays, parrots and macaws, the feathers of these, woven into tapestries, adorned her room, and were the subject of a poem by Cowper. Lord Rokeby’s friends were the beasts and birds on his estate, and thoughts of the Liberty of Man; Mrs Montagu’s friends were Horace Walpole (who liked her at moments), Burke, Lord Bath, Mrs Vesey and the other blue-stockings, the Garricks, and Dr Johnson, who permitted no liberty—at least in the conversation of others. Lord Rokeby enjoyed the country; Mrs Montagu did not enjoy the company of country gentlemen. ‘Our collection of men’, she wrote, ‘is very antique, they stand in my list thus. A man of sense, a little rusty, a beau a good deal the worse for wearing, a coxcomb extremely shattered, a pretty gentleman very insipid, a baronet very solemn, a squire very fat, a fop much affected, a barrister learned in Coke upon Littleton, but who knows nothing of ‘long ways for marry as will’, an heir apparent, very awkward; which of these will cast a favourable eye upon me I don’t know.’ Lord Rokeby enjoyed quiet and meditation; Mrs Fidget Montagu could never keep still. ‘Why’, she inquired, ‘shall a table that stands still require so many legs when I can fidget on two?’ and, most remarkable difference of all, whilst Lord Rokeby was celebrated for his beard, Mrs Montagu could not abide a beard: indeed, she was forced to tell her father that she could not draw the heads of Socrates and Seneca because of these appendages. ‘When I told him’, she informed the Duchess of Portland, ‘I found those great beards difficult to draw, he gave me St John’s head on a charger, so as to avoid the speculation of dismal faces.’

Lord Rokeby, in his early youth, having been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, elected suddenly to pay a visit to Aix-la-Chapelle, which, as Mr Kirby, one of his several biographers, hastens to explain to us, is ‘a city distinguished for its baths’. This visit seems to have changed the whole tenor of Lord Rokeby’s existence and, from that time onwards, an authority equal to that of the Archbishop of Armagh, or Prince William of Gloucester, had to be exerted before Lord Rokeby would come out of the water. The habit of eternal baths grew gradually, however, and was preceded by the equally remarkable growth of a long beard. This phenomenon appears to have arisen at about the time when Lord Rokeby was released, by death, from paternal authority, and succeeded to the family estate at Mount Morris, in Kent. Mr Kirby, who felt very strongly on the subject, said, with commendable restraint: ‘Beards were once considered as marks of respectability, particularly among the ancients.’ With regard to this article, however, opinion is now reversed, and it is, at least, regarded as an indubitable token of eccentricity. Why it was adopted by his Lordship is not known; reasons for such a conduct are not easily discovered; it bids defiance to conjecture, and baffles all sagacity. So much is certain, that he was for many years remarkable for this appendage, whose length, for it reached nearly to his waist, proclaimed it of no recent date. Lord Rokeby was, it seems, ‘much visited on account of the singularity of his manners, and the shrewdness of his remarks’; and in order, I suppose, that strangers might gaze upon his beard; and these phenomena, taken in conjunction, ‘never failed’, according to Mr Kirby, ‘to excite uncommon sensations’. The uncommon sensations were, a little later, excited still further by the amphibious habits to which I have referred, and which were, as I have hinted already, contracted during his visit to Aix-la-Chapelle. He erected a little hut on the sands at Hythe, about three miles from Mount Morris, and from this hut would dive, with commendable firmness, into the sea, remaining in this with the uttermost persistence, until he fainted and had to be withdrawn forcibly from the water.

Every day Lord Rokeby, whose appearance was very much like that of a benevolent troll, and whose back was bent as if he carried the weight of his winter forests, transformed into faggots, upon it, walked very slowly, carrying his hat under his arm, to the sands of Hythe. He was followed on these expeditions by a carriage and by a favourite servant, dressed in very elaborate livery, who, when he had trailed despondently for a mile or two in the wake of his master, would be hoisted into the carriage, and so transferred to the scene of action. If it rained, the servant travelled the whole way in the carriage, for Lord Rokeby would warn him that he was gaudily dressed, and not inured to wet, and might therefore spoil his clothes and occasion an illness. In the end, to the disappointment of the onlookers, but the relief of the servant, Lord Rokeby built a bath close to the house, which was ‘so constructed as to be rendered tepid by the rays of the sun only’. ‘The frequency of his ablutions’, we are assured by Mr Kirby, who seems to have been much bewildered by the behaviour of this amphibious old person, ‘was astonishing’. And listen to the testimony of an eyewitness of the behaviour in question, a gentleman who had ‘resolved to procure a sight of this extraordinary character’. ‘On my way, at the summit of the hill above Hythe, which affords a most delightful prospect, I perceived a fountain of pure water, overrunning a basin which had been placed for it by his lordship. I was informed that there were many such on the same road, and that he was accustomed to bestow a few half-crown pieces, plenty of which he always left loose in a side pocket, for any water-drinkers he might happen to find partaking of his favourite beverage, which he never failed to recommend with peculiar force and persuasion. On my approach, I stopped for some time to examine the mansion. It is a good, plain, gentleman’s seat; the grounds were abundantly stocked with black cattle, and I could perceive a horse or two on the steps of the principal entrance. After the necessary enquiries, I was conducted by a servant to a little grove on entering which, a building with a glass covering, that at first might appear to be a greenhouse, presented itself. The man who accompanied me opened a little wicket and, on looking in, I perceived immediately under the glass a bath, with a current of water supplied from a pond behind. On approaching the door, the handsome spaniels and the faithful guardians denied me access, till soothed by the well-known accents of the domestic. We then proceeded and, gently passing along a wooden floor, saw his lordship stretched on his face at the farther end. He had just come out of the water, and was dressed in an old blue woollen coat, and pantaloons of the same colour. The upper part of his head was bald, but the hair of his chin, which could not be concealed even by the posture he had assumed, made its appearance between his arms on each side. I immediately retired, and waited at a little distance until he awoke; when rising, he opened the door, darted through the thicket, accompanied by his dogs, and made directly for the house, while some workmen employed in cutting timber, and whose tongues only I had heard before, now made the wood resound again with their voices.’

Even the majestic style of the passage quoted above cannot hide from us the awe felt by the ‘gentleman who had resolved to procure a sight of the above extraordinary character’, on being brought face to face with both bath and beard.

In spite of certain sinister rumours that I shall mention later, Lord Rokeby’s diet consisted mainly of beef tea, while he ‘discouraged the consumption of exotics of every description, from an idea that the productions of our island were competent to the support of its inhabitants’. It must be said, however, that he relented on the occasion when he was obliged to leave his bath in order to receive Prince William of Gloucester at dinner. On this occasion, though the beard was still in evidence, Lord Rokeby’s other characteristics were not; the food was luxurious, and the choice of wines large, while the Prince’s dessert was accompanied by a particularly precious Tokay, which had been in the cellar for fifty years or more. Lord Rokeby was not, however, so courtierlike on all occasions; and once, when he had presented the Canterbury address to the new King, his sister, Fidget Montagu, told her husband: ‘I am glad he has gone into the country, but he has made a most astonishing appearance at Court with the Canterbury address. Morris says he hears of nothing else. I wish the beefeaters had not let him pass the door. Lord Harry Beauclerk, on the buzz his appearance occasioned, desired the people to be quiet, for that he had never seen the gentleman so well dressed before.’ His unaccountable behaviour was, indeed, a source of constant anxiety to the enchanting Fidget, who lived in terror, as we can see from this letter to her sister, that their brother might exhibit his amphibious and carnivorous habits at Bath, during one of her visits there. ‘I hope the Horton Gentleman’, she wrote, ‘will not change his journey to Spa for a visit to the Bath. I shall never be able to stand the joke of a gentleman’s bathing with a roast loin of veal floating at his elbows, all the Belles and Beaux of the Pump Room looking on and admiring. Our guide who did not know our relation said to be sure the Quality did make a great wonderment at it, but it was nice veal and he gave what he did not eat of it to her and some others; to be sure he was the particularest gentleman as ever she heard of, but he was very good-natured.’

This amphibious habit was not the only shadow cast on Mrs Montagu’s mind by her brother, for she was, as well, overshadowed by the Beard, and by the length of Lord Rokeby’s hair; she was, therefore, extremely relieved when these were explained away—smoothed over, as it were, by a series of pamphlets attacking Lord North’s policy. She refers to these in a letter: ‘Julius Caesar’, she explained, ‘exercised his valour in early youth, that he might hide the defect of baldness under the conqueror’s wreath. I think Mr Robinson’s [Lord Rokeby’s] hair wants an honourable cover as much as any baldness can do, and I am glad he has covered it with bays. There is no man in the world to whom such a proof of talents is more important. If a man shows genius, people think all his oddities are the excrescences of genius. I have sent to London for the pamphlet.’

Lord Rokeby’s hair and beard were not the only products of nature which were left to run wild; for in his parks and woods—I cannot do better than quote Mr Kirby in this connection, once again, since his style is perfectly suited to the subject—‘Nature was not, in any respect, checked by art, and the animals of every class were left in the same state of perfect freedom, and were seen bounding through his pastures with uncommon spirit and energy’; whilst the venerable owner might, at moments, I imagine, be seen leaping through the same pastures with an equal freedom, in virtuous pursuit of some fleeting female form, since ‘he was, in his youth, a great admirer of the fair sex, and even in his old age is said to have been a great admirer of female beauty’. ‘Among the women, none more sprightly, none more ready to join in innocent mirth, or to be the subject of it,’ exclaimed Messrs Wilson and Caulfield in a burst of uncontrollable enthusiasm. But then comes a darker note, for we learn that certain persons, whose susceptibilities had been offended by the beard, believed him to live on raw flesh, whilst others claimed that he was a cannibal!

It remains to be said that Lord Rokeby ‘delighted much in the air, without any other canopy than the heavens, whilst in winter his windows were generally open’, and that he disapproved of medicine, and once, when threatened with a paroxysm, ‘told his nephew that, should he stay, he was welcome’; but that if, out of a false humanity, he called in medical assistance, Lord Rokeby, if he remained by some strange chance unslaughtered by the doctor, hoped to retain sufficient use of his hands and senses to make a new will and disinherit his errant nephew.

Lord Rokeby had a peculiar dislike, too, of going to church, and ‘this singularity’, as Messrs Wilson and Caulfield gravely assure us, ‘in abstaining from places of religious worship arose, partly from the exalted view which he entertained of the nature of the Deity, whose altars, he used to say emphatically, were on earth, sea, and skies; from the little regard he paid to the clerical or ministerial character, and from the disgust in his mind at the stress laid by divines upon trifles, their illiberality in wishing everyone to rely upon them, for their faith, their frequent persecution of others, and from a strong opinion of the inefficacy of their preaching’.

This exalted view of the nature of the Deity, with its accompanying train of strange opinions, led on one occasion to a magnificent exhibition of Lord Rokeby’s courtesy and his resource in dealing with an awkward situation. ‘The Archbishop of Armagh’, said Lord Rokeby to an admirer, ‘told me that he would dine with me on Saturday. I gave orders for dinner and so forth for my cousin the Archbishop; but I never thought, till he came, that the next day was Sunday. What was I to do? Here was my cousin the Archbishop, and he must go to church, and there was no way to the church, and the chancel door had been locked up for these thirty years; and my pew was certainly not fit for my cousin the Archbishop. I sent off immediately to Hythe for the carpenter and the joiners, and the drapers, and into the village for the labourers, the movers, and the gravel-carters. All went to work, the path was mowed, the gravel was thrown down and rolled, and a gate made for the church-yard, the chancel door opened and cleaned, a new pew set up, well lined and stuffed and cushioned; and the next day I walked by the side of my cousin the Archbishop to church, who found everything right and proper; but I have not been to church since, I assure you.’

Lord Rokeby’s life, indeed, was not devoid of excitement, and of such incidents as that when, aged eighty-three, he stayed at the Chequers Inn, at Lenham, for the purpose of voting in the general election of 1796, and was there surrounded by an admiring crowd, consisting of all the inhabitants of the countryside, who had conceived the idea that he was a Turk. From this scene of animation and curiosity, we are told, he proceeded to the polling-booth, and voted for his old friend Filmer Honeywood.

We are assured, finally, that in spite of the beard, which in his old age reached to his knees, and in spite of his amphibious habits, he ‘possessed virtues by which his defects were abundantly overbalanced’. Particularly remarkable among these virtues were his ardent love of freedom and hatred of oppression. He never ceased to clamour on behalf of the one and against the other, ‘speaking his mind freely on all occasions, and drawing from his enemies expressions of admiration. Intent on the diffusion of happiness, he uniformly studied, though in his own peculiar manner, the welfare and prosperity of his own country.’

Venerable and admired, he died at his seat in Kent in the month of December, 1800, in the eighty-eighth year of his age.

It is melancholy, but instructive, to turn from Lord Rokeby, with his habit of eternal baths, to the case of that other Ornamental Hermit, Mrs Celestina Collins, who left a large fortune, and died in her house in St Peter’s Street, Coventry, at the age of seventy. Of this not entirely pleasing old lady, Mr Cyrus Redding said, with commendable restraint, that ‘her disposition was eccentric, and when she once adopted an idea, nothing could induce her to abandon it’.

Among other ideas adopted by Mrs Celestina Collins was that of inviting thirty fowls to sleep in her bed, or, alternately, amongst the kitchen furniture. Her favourite, amongst these bustling and restless companions, was an immense cock, whose spurs, as the result of age, had grown to the length of three inches. This cock shared her affections with a huge rat, and these two inseparable companions were present at all her meals, which were miserly in the extreme, and which were, I am afraid, tempered by the nature and habits of the two familiars. This state of affairs lasted until, in the end, grown savage because of the shortness of the rations, the rat flew into a rage with the cock, and Mrs Collins in her turn flew into a temper with the rat, striking him a blow which, to her great remorse, killed him.

Mr Redding’s restraint is shown, once more, in this pregnant sentence: ‘So much was she attached to vermin, obnoxious to all other persons, that a nest of mice was found in her bed.’

Mrs Celestina Collins was not the only person whose bed held surprises for the unwary, as we shall see when we come to the chapter on ‘Misers’. But meanwhile, let us dip into the nest of another Ornamental Hermit.

This gentleman, equally Ornamental, was to be found, about eighty years ago, a few miles from Stevenage, where a happy correspondent of the Wolverhampton Chronicle was privileged to interview him, and to tell his readers: ‘Time, that destroyer of all things, had done its work here ... no cheering voice is heard within these walls, only the noise of rats and vermin.... With difficulty, by the faint rays of light, admitted into the loathsome den, I could trace a human form, clothed only in a horse-rug, leaving his arms, legs, and feet perfectly bare. Already eleven weary winters had he passed in this dreary abode, his only bed being two sheepskins and his sole companions the rats, which may be seen passing to and fro with all the ease of perfect safety. During the whole of his seclusion he has strictly abstained from ablution. Consequently his countenance is perfectly black. How much it is to be regretted that a man, as gifted as this hermit is known to be, should spend his days in dirt and seclusion.’

[1] See Dr Russell’s History of Medicine.

[2] ‘Sains’ means preserves, ‘brate’ means apron, ‘rea’ means plunder, ‘reeds’ means roods, or Holy horses.