Scotland made a pilgrimage from Stirling to the shrine, in order to
procure a propitious passage to France in search of a wife. But in
1543, Lord Hertford, during his destructive voyage to the Forth,
destroyed, with other objects of greater consequence, the chapel of
the "Lady of Lorett," which was not likely in those days to be
rebuilt; and so the hermit of Musselburgh vanishes from history.

A few years before, in 1537, says Mr. Froude, {333} while the
harbours, piers, and fortresses were rising in Dover, "an ancient
hermit tottered night after night from his cell to a chapel on the
cliff, and the tapers on the altar before which he knelt in his
lonely orisons made a familiar beacon far over the rolling waters.
The men of the rising world cared little for the sentiment of the
past. The anchorite was told sternly by the workmen that his light
was a signal to the King's enemies" (a Spanish invasion from
Flanders was expected), "and must burn no more; and, when it was
next seen, three of them waylaid the old man on his way home, threw
him down and beat him cruelly."

So ended, in an undignified way, as worn-out institutions are wont
to end, the hermit life in the British Isles. Will it ever
reappear? Who can tell? To an age of luxury and unbelief has
succeeded, more than once in history, an age of remorse and
superstition. Gay gentlemen and gay ladies may renounce the world,
as they did in the time of St Jerome, when the world is ready to
renounce them. We have already our nunneries, our monasteries, of
more creeds than one; and the mountains of Kerry, or the pine
forests of the Highlands, may some day once more hold hermits,
persuading themselves to believe, and at last succeeding in
believing, the teaching of St. Antony, instead of that of our Lord