Luxurious hermits: asceticism, luxury and retirement in the eighteenth-century English garden

Abstract

In his magisterial Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson offered four separate but clearly interrelated definitions of the word ‘luxury,’ among which were ‘voluptuousness,’ ‘lust’ and ‘delicious fare.’ As an example of the correct usage of the latter, Johnson cited a line from a fascinating description of a hermitage near Fribourg in Switzerland, seen by Joseph Addison and included in his Remarks on Several Parts if Italy (1706). For the sake of both utility and interest, Addison's account will be reproduced in full here. Johnson, in fact, only quotes the penultimate sentence, and that rather freely. But Addison's description makes visible an example of what was the most common type of hermitage still surviving both in England and on the Continent into the eighteenth century, and thus available to travelers, i.e. a domicile, often of several rooms, hollowed out of a rock wall.