many books sticking out of his pockets, which, he said, contained the doctrines of Popery. However, these preachings proved very unprofitable; the hermit grew poor, and gladly accepted any assistance which did not require him to relinquish his eccentric mode of living. In his own words, his heart was in his garden. We abridge this account from a contribution to the _Book of Days_. It is curious to find many instances of what are termed "Ornamental Hermits," set up by persons of fortune seeking to find men as eccentric as themselves, to represent, as it were, the eremitical life in hermitages provided for them upon their estates. Archibald Hamilton, afterwards Duke of Hamilton (as his daughter, Lady Dunmore, told Mr. Rogers, the poet), advertised for "a hermit," as an ornament to his pleasure-grounds; and it was stipulated that the said hermit should have his beard shaved but once a year, and that only partially. Gilbert White, in his poem, _The Invitation to Selborne_, has these lines:-- Or where the Hermit hangs the straw-clad cell, Emerging gently from the leafy dell: By fancy plann'd, &c. In a note, this hermitage is said to have been a grotesque building, contrived by a young gentleman who used occasionally to appear in the character of a hermit. Some fancy of this kind at Lulworth Castle, in Dorsetshire, exaggerated or highly coloured by O'Keefe, was supposed to afford him the title and incident of his extravagant but laughable comedy of _The London Hermit; or, Rambles in Dorsetshire_, first played in 1793. In _Blackwood's Magazine_ for April, 1830, it is stated by Christopher North, in the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, that the then editor of another 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 hour-glass 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." In 1810, a correspondent of _Notes and Queries_, visiting the grounds at Hawkstone, the seat of the Hills, was shown the hermitage there, with a stuffed figure dressed like the hermits of pictures, seen by a dim light; and the visitors were told that it had been inhabited in the daytime by a poor man, to whom the eccentric but truly benevolent Sir Richard Hill gave a maintenance on that easy condition; but that the popular voice against such _slavery_ had induced the worthy baronet to withdraw the reality and substitute the figure.