ROBERT

See also:

• STEPHEN
• STEPHEN (1097?-1154)
• STEPHEN (ISTVAN) BATHORY (1533-1586)
• STEPHEN, SIR JAMES (1789-1859)
• STEPHEN, SIR JAMES FITZJAMES, BART
• STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE (1832-1904)

STEPHEN

See also:

• ROBERT STEPHEN HAWKER (1803–1874)

HAWKER (1803–1874)  , English antiquary and poet, was born at Stoke Damerel, Devonshire, on the 3rd of December 1803 . His father, Jacob Stephen Hawker, was at that time a doctor, but afterwards curate and vicar of Stratton, Cornwall . Robert was sent to Liskeard grammar school, and when he was about sixteen was apprenticed to a solicitor . He was soon removed to Cheltenham grammar school, and in April 1823 matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford . In the same year he married Charlotte I'Ans, a lady much older than himself . On returning to Oxford he migrated to Magdalen Hall, where he graduated in 1828, having already won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1827 . He became vicar of Morwenstow, a village on the north Cornish coast, in 18J4 . Hawker described the bulk of his parishioners as a " mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hues." He was himself a high churchman, and carried things with a high hand in his parish, but was much beloved by his people . He was a man of great originality, and numerous stories were told of his striking sayings and eccentric conduct . He was the original of Mortimer Collins's Canon Tremaine in Sweet and Twenty . His first wife died in 1863, and in 1864 he married Pauline Kuczynski, daughter of a Polish exile . He died in Plymouth on the 15th of August 1875 .

Before his

death he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church, a proceeding which aroused a bitter newspaper controversy . The best of his poems is The Quest of the Sangraal: Chant the First (Exeter, 1864) . Among his Cornish Ballads (1869) the most famous is on " Trelawny," the refrain of which, " And shall Trelawny die," &c., he declared to be an old Cornish saying . See The Vicar of Morwenstow (1875; later and corrected editions, 1876 and 1886), by the Rev . S . Baring-Gould, which was severely criticized by Hawker's friend, W . Maskell, in the Athenaeum (March 26, 1876); Memorials of the late Robert Stephen Hawker (1876), by the late Dr F . G . Lee . These were superseded in 1905 by The Life and Letters of R . S . Hawker, by his son-in-law, C .

E .

Byles, which contains a bibliography of his works, now very valuable to collectors . Sec also Boase and Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis . His Poetical Works (1879) and his Prose Works (1893) were edited by J . G . Godwin . Another edition of his Poetical Works (1899) has a preface and bibliography by Alfred Wallis, and a complete edition of his poems by C . E . Boles, with the title Cornish Ballads and other Poems, appeared in 1904 .