appellation given to a kind of solitaries, who spend their lives seated on the tops of columns, to be, as they imagine, the better disposed for meditation, &c. Of these we find several mentioned in ancient writers, and even as low as the eleventh century. The founder of the order was St. Simon Stylites, a famous anchorite in the fifth century, who took up his abode on a column six cubits high; then on a second, of twelve cubits; a third, of twenty-two; and, at last, on another of thirty-six. The extremity of these columns were only three feet in diameter, with a kind of rail or ledge about it that reached almost to the girdle, somewhat resembling a pulpit. There was no lying down in it. The faquires, or devout people of the east, imitate this extraordinary kind of life even to this day.