SHELBURNE ESSAYS FOURTH SERIES THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 1875 to be exact, English Church, SOME thirty years ago, in that unstable compound, the was shocked by the news that a Cornish clergyman, dying away from home, had received the sacraments from the hands of a Roman priest. Over the head of his young wife, who had summoned the ministrant to his bedside, there was poured a bitter stream of controversy, as was the wont of the Establishment in those days; and the storm was not allayed by the publication a few months later of a somewhat irresponsible biography of the apostate by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould. It was then seen that this deathbed conversion was only the last act of a life crammed with eccentricities, and from that day to this the Vicar of Morwenstow has enjoyed a kind of pre-eminence in curiosity. At last his son-inlaw, Mr. C. E. Byles, has collected his scattered prose and verse in two attractive volumes, and has added to these a full and accurate record of his life.' There is no doubt as to the value of the result. Hawker cannot by any stretch of courtesy be called quite a great writer, but I do not hesitate to say that the works and biography together bring us acquainted with one of the most original and most interesting personalities of the past century. He is likely to be remembered longer than some who have achieved more as artists. And if he cannot be ranked among the great, at least his writings, long before Mr. BaringGould made him a subject of romance, had attained an anomalous celebrity. One of his curious methods of reaching the public was to print off a poem in the form of leaflet, which he then inclosed, like advertisements, n business and friendly letters. In this way and through other obscure channels of publication, some of his poems attained a kind of life apart from their author. They even received the dubious praise of being imitated and stolen, and his best work had a humourous trick of gaining currency as anonymous and ancient folklore. His Sir Beville 1 Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall. R. S. Hawker. New York: John Lane, 1903. By Cornish Ballads and Other Poems. By R. S. Hawker. John Lane, 1904. The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (Sometime Vicar of Morwenstow). By his Son-in-law, C. E. Byles. John Lane, 1905. was included in Major Egerton Leigh's Ballads and Legends of Cheshire, published in 1867, where it was described as "A Royalist song found amongst the family papers in an old oak chest, at Erdeswick Hall, one of the seats of the Minshull family." Nor was this a solitary instance. Most notable of all was the fortune of his Song of the Western Men, which, as the ballad that has raised the loudest discussion, may here be quoted entire: A good sword and a trusty hand! A merry heart and true! King James's men shall understand And have they fixed the where and when? Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Out spake their Captain brave and bold: "If London Tower were Michael's hold, "We'll cross the Tamar, land to land : The Severn is no stay: With 'one and all,' and hand in hand; "And when we come to London Wall, Come forth! come forth! ye cowards all: Trelawny he's in keep and hold: But here's twenty thousand Cornish bold The stanzas were first published by Hawker anonymously in a provincial newspaper, when he was twenty-three. With the exception of the italicised refrain, which is traditional and was supposed by Hawker to allude to Sir Jonathan Trelawny, one of the seven Bishops imprisoned by James II., the poem is entirely original. Yet so well had it caught the popular vein that it soon passed for an ancient ballad. Mr. Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal Society of London, had it printed as such on a broadside; Sir Walter Scott, in a note to his own poems, wrote of it as "a curious and spirited specimen" of the popular ballad; and Macaulay, in his History of England, used it as an indication of the feeling in Cornwall during the trial of the bishops. It has since been discovered that Hawker himself was partly mistaken, and that the refrain alludes to an earlier Trelawny than the persecuted Churchman; but that is small matter. No wonder that the author contemplated his ravished honours with some jealousy. "All these years," he exclaimed bitterly, "the Song has been bought and sold, set to music and pplauded, while I have lived on among these far-away rocks unprofited, unpraised, and unknown. This is an epitome of my whole life. Others have drawn profit from my brain, while |