The engraving at the top of this article is by Thomas Wright and was published in his book Universal Architecture in 1755. While the skull and crossbones over the door does look a bit sinister, this hermit’s cell is more appealing than many of the hermitages which were erected in English landscape gardens during the second half on the 18th century.

Like most elements of the Romantic Movement, the fashion for garden hermitages was rooted in literature, especially the conclusion of John Milton’s poem Il Penseroso:
“And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heav'n doth show,
And every herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.
These pleasures, Melancholy, give,
And I with thee will choose to live”

I didn’t understand why Il Penseroso was so influential on gardens until I read its companion poem L'Allegro. Both poems were written in the early 1630’s and Milton intended for them to be read together. L’Allegro is about the sensual pleasures of country life, especially for the privileged who could also enjoy evenings in town; it is like a portrait of the 18th century gentry, even though it was written a century earlier.

Il Penseroso is about the pleasures of a thoughtful life. It is difficult for me to think of melancholy as a pleasure, but I totally understand the somber pleasures of beautiful church services:
“There let the pealing organ blow
To the full voiced choir below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heav'n before mine eyes.”

Though Milton’s poems, I can see that garden hermitages were not entirely frivolous; they were an attempt to balance the sensual pleasures of an arcadian dream with Christianity’s exaltation of the contemplative life.

I began this article by stating that while the skull and crossbones over the door of the hermitage in Wright’s engraving is a bit sinister, the building is more appealing than many of the hermitages which were erected in landscape gardens. The hermitage in Hagley park seems to have been quite typical. Joseph Heeley visited Hagley in 1775 and described the hermitage as “being well adapted to the scenery about it, being rudely formed with clumps of wood, and jagged old roots, jambed together, and its interstaces simply filled with moss: the floor is neatly paved with small pebbles, and a matted couch goes around it.” As in many garden hermitages, the concluding lines of Milton’s Il Penseroso”were inscribed on the walls of this room.

The skull and crossbones in Wright’s engraving was not unusual. Floors of hermitages were often paved with knucklebones and no hermitage was complete without a human skull for the hermit to ponder. The hermitage a Marston even featured a fence made out of horse skulls and bones.

The hermitage at Marston was actually created for the youngest son of the wealthy earl of Cork and Orrey to live in, but most of the inhabitants of garden hermitages were hired. Advertisements for hermits were placed in newspapers. The standard contract was for seven years, during which period the hermit was not permitted to leave to park, speak, bathe, or to cut his beard, hair, and nails. At the end of seven years the hermit would be paid. Charles Hamilton offered seven hundred guineas for a hermit to live for seven years in his garden at Painshill, but the hermit who accepted the position only lasted for three weeks as he was caught off grounds at a local pub; his contract stated that if he failed to live up to any of the conditions, that the entire sum would be forfeited.

I wonder how many hermits were paid, since many of them didn’t stick it out for the full seven years. One of the more unusual newspaper advertisements was for a hermit who would live in a comfortable underground room for seven years. Even though he was not going to be seen by anyone, his employer still insisted that he not cut his nails, hair or beard, but he was to have food from the house, plenty of books to read and an organ to play. If the hermit stayed underground for seven years, he would have been paid 50 pounds a year for life, but the hermit who accepted the offer left after four years.

Many owners of landscape gardens became tired of trying to find men who were willing to live as hermits hired hermits and placed wax figures in their hermitages. The hermitage at Hawkstone Park was inhabited by a robot named Francis. When visitors approached the hermitage, Francis would rise to greet them. Francis was operated by a man who was hidden from view. Francis must have been a rather sophisticated piece of machinery, since he could move his mouth while the hidden man quoted poetry as he pulled levers.

While Francis may have been an impressive toy, I doubt that he created an atmosphere of contemplative melancholy. If the owners of landscape gardens had built snug hermitages and encouraged contemplative souls to live in them, they could have created the sort of mood that Milton wrote about. A figure in a monastic robes walking silently in a grove of trees would have been perfect, but by decorating hermitages with bones and insisting that monks not cut their nails, hair or beards, they were creating an atmosphere more sinister than meditative.

Milton wrote Il Penseroso and L’Allegro as a young man before his puritan tendencies became dominant. When read together, these poems express not just the complex emotions of a young Englishman, but the complexity of the human soul. They remind me of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narziss und Goldmund. Any work of art which can evoke or express such a full range of emotions is bound to be interesting. I am not suggesting that we pay hermits to live in our gardens, but maybe we should have a place for melancholy pleasures in them.