Articles for a Hermit

by Alexander Pope, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The Bill

Printed at Salisbury, and put up in the inns of that city and of Wilton, in the second week of September, 1736:

WANTED, by a Gentleman of this County, a sober Person of a contemplative Turn, to inhabit a HERMITAGE lately built in his Grounds, for the Term of SEVEN YEARS. He shall be found a Habit of grey Camlet, a Mat, a Hassock, an Hour-glass, a Bible, and his Victuals from the House. He shall engage by Articles: I. Not to speak. II. Not to cut his Hair, Beard or Nails. III. Not to pass the Paling of the Wilderness. IV. To be Seen at his Door whenever Company walks. And V. At the End of the Term complete he shall receive FIVE HUNDRED GUINEAS; and upon Failure in any Article, Nothing. Enquire of Mr Pinnock, Gardener, at Pensworth Park, beyond Wilton.

I. Of the Applicant

Job Hiscock read the bill in the back room of an alehouse at Wilton, where he had lived for six weeks on credit, on the understanding that he was a cousin of the landlady's late husband.

He was thirty-four, a writing-master by trade, with a fine round hand and no pupils. He owed Mr Absalom Weeks, tailor, of Catherine Street in Salisbury, fourteen pounds seven shillings and sixpence. The sum was for a coat and breeches of mulberry cloth, with a waistcoat to match, made in the winter to court a widow at Fisherton. The widow had since gone to a maltster and the coat to a pawnbroker, and the bill had stayed where it was, as bills do.

Before he kept a school Hiscock had copied for three years for an attorney in the Close, and he knew two things about a debt of fourteen pounds that Mr Weeks perhaps did not. The first was that it was above the sum for which a man may be arrested before judgment. A writ and a bailiff might take him up in any street of Salisbury and lodge him in the county gaol at Fisherton Anger until he paid, which he could not. The second was that by a statute of King James a debt of that kind, if it was not sued for within six years, could not be sued for at all.

He read the bill twice. Seven was more than six.

He walked to Pensworth the next morning by the field way, which was longer than the road and had no bailiffs on it. Mr Pinnock, the gardener, a broad man with a cold, looked him over at the stable gate as he would have looked over a yew that had come from the nursery. Then he took him round to the garden, where Mr Hugh Spilsbury was standing on his new ha-ha and watching two men turf the far side of it.

Mr Spilsbury walked round the applicant once, slowly, as a man walks round a statue sent on approval.

"He is short for it," he said.

"He will grow, sir," said Pinnock. "In the beard."

Mr Spilsbury had him sit on a hassock at the bottom of the yew walk and went himself to the head of it, forty paces off, where the ladies would first see him, to judge the effect. He came back pleased with it. He asked whether the man could read. Hiscock said that he could.

"It does not signify," said Mr Spilsbury. "But it looks better if the eyes move."

He asked nothing else. A hermit is supposed to have a past, and the less that is known of it the better it serves. The Articles were signed at Michaelmas in the steward's room, Pinnock witnessing with a mark, and that was the last word Job Hiscock spoke for seven years: "Here?" — meaning the place on the paper.

‡ The statute is the twenty-first of James I, chapter sixteen. It was made to quiet old claims, not to shelter writing-masters; but a law is like a wall, and shelters whoever stands behind it.

II. Of the First Article: Not to Speak

The Hermitage stood at the bottom of the Wilderness, in a hollow among yews, where the sun came for an hour at noon and then thought better of it. It was built of flint and the roots of trees, with a thatch of heath, a bench of dry stone at the door, a window the size of a Bible, and a bed of boards. Within were the hourglass, the mat, the hassock and the Bible, which was bound up with the Common Prayer as country Bibles are. There was a pair of spectacles that Hiscock did not need, and a skull. Pinnock had bought the skull of the sexton of the next parish for half a crown, and no questions were asked on either side.

Twice a day Pinnock brought victuals from the house in a covered basket. He was forbidden by Mr Spilsbury to exchange a word with the Hermit, and he exchanged a great many, all of them his own. He talked of the weather, his cold, the steward, the price of turnips and the ingratitude of yews. The Hermit gave him no answer, and Pinnock found him the best company he had kept in years.

The silence was not hard. Hiscock had expected to find it hard and found it easy within a week. What he had not expected was its effect on everyone else. A man who does not speak becomes, very soon, a thing in front of which other people talk.

Company came on fine afternoons. Pinnock took sixpence a head at the garden door, which was his perquisite, and led them down the yew walk to the paling of the Wilderness, which ran ten paces from the Hermit's door. There they stood and talked, of the Hermit at first and then of everything. They talked of Mr Spilsbury's taste and Mr Spilsbury's debts, of one another's wives, of the price of wool. A young man proposed marriage at the paling and was refused there. A clergyman rehearsed a sermon on contempt of the world, and asked his wife whether the Hermit would not do for an illustration of it, and she said that he would do very well. The skull heard as much as the Hermit, and said as little.

Pinnock's account of him improved with the years. In the first year it was "He has not spoke since Michaelmas." In the second it was "He was a gentleman once." In the third he said that the Hermit had been crossed in love, which was true, and that he had seen the vanity of the world. Hiscock had: the widow, the coat and the bill.

‡ In a hermitage, silence is held to be the voice of wisdom; in a debtor, it is the voice of prudence. At ten paces the two cannot be told apart, and the Commentator has not found that they can be told apart at one.

III. Of the Second Article: Not to Cut His Hair, Beard or Nails

By the first Lady Day he had a beard. By the second it was over his collar, and in the third year it came in grey at the chin, which pleased Mr Spilsbury more than anything since the ha-ha. Ladies drew it. A gentleman from Bath asked leave to bring a painter. The nails were the worst of it, for by the second winter he could not turn the leaves of the Bible with them and had to turn them with the side of his hand, like a man sweeping crumbs.

He read because the Articles had given him nothing else to do with his eyes. He began at the Psalms, in the Prayer Book, because the Prayer Book divides them by the days of the month, morning and evening, and so gave him a calendar. Every month he read the Psalter through. On the thirty-first he read the thirtieth day's psalms again, and in February he left off where February left off. In this way he knew the date without a clock. When the Psalms had become a calendar he read the rest. He read the Book of Job, which was his own name, and found it longer than he had been told.

He turned the hourglass when it ran out, though the Articles did not require him to. It was an hour glass, and it ran an hour, and in the hollow among the yews there was nothing else that told the hour. Before long his hand went to it before he had seen that it was empty.

Mr Spilsbury brought his guests down after dinner with a lantern, to see the beard by lamplight. They stood at the paling with the light held up, and the Hermit sat on his bench in the grey camlet with the skull on his knee. He looked past the lantern to the glass, where the last of the sand was going, and put out his hand and turned it.

‡ The garden at Pensworth had a Temple of Friendship, which was used for cards; a ruined Abbey, built new, which was used to store hurdles; and a Hermitage, which was used for contemplation. Of the three, only the last was put to the use its builder intended, and it was put to it by a man who had come there to hide.

IV. Of the Fourth Article: To Be Seen

On a fine afternoon in the June of the third year, Pinnock took two sixpences at the gate. Hiscock knew who had paid them before he saw him, by the voice that came down the yew walk still disputing the second sixpence. Mr Absalom Weeks had come out from Salisbury with his wife in a hired chaise, to see the Hermit everyone was talking of.

He came down the walk first, a short, quick man in a bottle-green coat of his own making, and stopped at the paling, and looked.

The Article said that the Hermit was to be seen, and he was. He sat on his bench with the skull, as he did every afternoon, and looked at the skull, as he did every afternoon, and the tailor looked at him. Mr Weeks looked a long time. He looked at the beard and the nails, and at the bare feet, and longest at the habit, as a tailor will.

"Camlet," he said to his wife. "Grey camlet, and poor. I'd not have cut it so in the sleeve."

Then he looked at the skull, and grew solemn, and began to talk of the world.

He said that it was a hard world for a tradesman. He said that he had on his books at that moment above sixty pounds in bad debts, every penny laid out in good cloth. One man alone, a writing-master, had run off owing him fourteen pound seven and six, for a mulberry suit he had never worn twice. He believed he had gone to London, and he would never see the money now. And what, said Mr Weeks, was fourteen pound to that old man there? Nothing. He had put it all behind him. There was a lesson in it.

His wife said that there was.

Mr Weeks gave Pinnock a shilling at the gate "for the old gentleman," who was thirty-seven, and Pinnock kept it, which was also his perquisite. The chaise went back to Salisbury. The Hermit sat on with the skull until the light went out of the hollow, and then he turned the glass.

Mr Weeks came again the next June, and the June after. He found that he went home the better for it. Each time he stood at the paling and talked of the world, the bad debts and the mulberry suit, and each time he went away consoled. The Hermit sat and was seen.

‡ Mr Weeks paid sixpence to look at what he was owed fourteen pounds seven and six for, and thought it cheap. The Commentator does not say that he was wrong.

V. Of the Third Article: Not to Pass the Paling

The Wilderness was a little over two acres. Hiscock came to know every yew in it, the place where the moss was thickest and the places where it would not grow, and the one gap in the hedge where a fox came through at dusk. The paling was the edge of the world. Beyond it, as he heard from the company, there was a war with Spain, and a frost so hard that the Thames froze over, and a new man in Silver Street who was taking the tailoring trade of Salisbury. Within it there were the yews, the glass and the Psalms.

The tailor's bill had been due at Lady Day, 1736. On Lady Day, 1742, it ceased to be owed in law.

Nothing happened. It rained. Pinnock brought bacon and a complaint about the steward. The Hermit read the psalms appointed for the twenty-fifth day of the month, for the sixty-sixth time, and turned the glass when it ran out. At dusk the fox came through the gap in the hedge, saw him, and went back.

He might have walked out of the Wilderness the next morning a free man. No writ could touch him now, and no bailiff could take him up for a coat. He would have walked out with nothing, for the Fifth Article paid on completion and on nothing less, and the Articles had a year and a half still to run.

The next morning he went the ten paces to the paling and stood at it. The gate was latched with a wooden peg. He put his hand on the top rail, and stood so for about the time it takes a glass to run, and went back to his bench.

That June Mr Weeks came alone, his wife being unwell. He came in a coat that a tailor should not have been seen in, and he spoke a good deal about the new man in Silver Street. When he came to the mulberry suit he said "fourteen pound" and stopped, and did not finish the figure.

‡ The law had forgiven the debt and the Article had not yet paid the wage. For eighteen months the Hermit owed nothing and owned nothing, and so stood, for that time, exactly where the man in the habit was supposed to stand. The Commentator observes that this was the only period of the seven years in which he was precisely what he had been engaged to represent, and that nobody at Pensworth noticed it.

VI. Of the Fifth Article: Of the Reward

In the June of the seventh year Mr Weeks came down the walk more slowly than before, with a stick, and a pocket-book under his arm.

He did not look at the Hermit at first. He told Pinnock, who had not asked, that he had sold the lease of the shop in Catherine Street. He was to go and live with a married daughter at Devizes, and work for the new man in Silver Street by the piece until he went. He had brought his book of bad debts with him. He meant to burn it, and he had a fancy to read it over first in this place, where it seemed to signify least.

He stood at the paling and read it over to himself, his lips moving down the column, as a man reads a list of the dead. Then he shut the book and looked at the skull and said what he always said, that it was nothing to the old man there.

The Hermit got up.

He had not risen while company stood at the paling in nearly seven years. Pinnock took a step forward and then did not know what to do with it. The Hermit went into the Hermitage and came out with the Bible, and sat down with it on the bench, and tore out the blank leaf at the front. He took a stick from the cold hearth that was burned to a point at one end. Holding it as well as his nails allowed, he wrote on the leaf, slowly, in a round hand, which is a difficult hand to make with a stick. Then he went the ten paces to the paling, which the Third Article allowed, and held the leaf out over it.

Mr Weeks took it.

I, Job Hiscock, owe to Absalom Weeks fourteen pounds seven shillings and sixpence, for a coat, breeches and waistcoat of mulberry cloth, and will pay it at Michaelmas.

Mr Weeks read it twice. Then he looked up from the paper to the beard, and over the beard to the eyes above it, for a long time, as a tailor looks for a man's measure under a coat that does not fit him. The tailor opened his pocket-book and laid the leaf in it, between the pages, at the place where the mulberry suit was entered. He shut the book on it carefully, as a man shuts a book he is no longer going to burn.

"He has not spoke these seven year," said Pinnock.

The Hermit went back to his bench and sat down, and took up the skull, and looked at the glass, which was running out. He turned it.

‡ In that age a debt barred by the statute was revived by any acknowledgment of it, whether written or spoken. The Hermit kept the First Article by writing his acknowledgment, the Third by handing it over the paling and not through the gate, and the Fourth throughout, since he was seen doing it by two persons. He was paid his five hundred guineas in the hall at Pensworth at Michaelmas, 1743, by Mr Spilsbury, who had him shaved first. The day-book of Absalom Weeks, tailor, late of Catherine Street, records under the third of October the receipt of fourteen pounds seven shillings and sixpence, and a line drawn through an entry of 1736.

‡ Mr Spilsbury advertised again at Lady Day. The second hermit lasted eleven weeks, and was dismissed for singing.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alexandrō Pōpiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alexander Pope, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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