Hawker

Hawker, Robert Stephen (1803-75), a Cornish clergyman and poet, was the son of a Plymouth physician and grandson of a well-known vicar of that town. He was educated at Cheltenham and Pembroke College, Oxford, and before he went up married a rich lady. He won the Newdigate prize in 1827. Having been ordained in 1831, he was presented three years later to the vicarage of Morwenstow, on the north coast of Cornwall, where he passed the rest of his life. He married as his second wife a Polish lady, by whom he is thought to have been persuaded to enter the Roman Church. Of his poems, the best known, is the ballad And Shall Trelawneg Die ? which Macaulay quoted as a genuine work of the 17th century. His Records of the Western Shore, published in 1832, reappeared in 1840, with additions, in Ecclesia; and further additions were contained in Echoes of Old Cornwall (1846). The Quest of the Sangreal was published seven years before Tennyson's Holy Grail. In Cornish Ballads (1869) many of Hawker's early poems were reprinted. Biographies by Mr. Baring-Gould and the Rev. F. G. Lee have been published, and Hawker's friend, J. Godwin, edited his complete works in 1879.