We owe a debt of gratitude to the late Vicar

of Morwen- stow, Mr. Robert Stephen Hawker, for having caught and crystallised into stirring prose and verse many of those echoes. His Cornish Ballads are well known, especially " The Song of * Tho Prose, Work.; of tho Roy. R. B. Hatcher. Edinburgh and London : William Blaokwood and Amis. lines— "Hearken ! there is in old Morwenna's shrine,

" And shell Trelawny die P Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why !"

—were really old, having been a popular proverb in Cornwall First in the chancel, then along the wall, since the days of James IL " The Gate-Song of Stowe " will Slowly it travels on—a leafy line, always keep alive the memory of Sir Beville Granville :— With hero and there a cluster ; and anon

And Harris of Hayne's o'er the river ; See at the altar side the steadfast root, From Lundy to Looe, ' One and all' is the cry, Mark well the branches, count the summer fruit. And the King and Sir Beville for ever. So lot a meek and faithful heart be thine.

Aye! by Tre, Pol, and Pen, ye may know Cornishmen,

legendary poems, Mr. Hawker contributed many interesting in. her memory. The spiritual life to him was the real prose articles to various periodicals. Some of these he col. life, but the sorrows and anxieties of our everyday world lected and published in 1870, under the title of Footprints of were none the less real to him, and it was his intense Former Men in Far Cornwall, and these sketches are now sympathy with all that suffer and need help that won reprinted, with the addition of others that have not been pub- the hearts of his parishioners. The men with whom he lished before. For forty years he lived in the lonely village had to deal were rough smugglers and wreckers. We have of Morwenstow, where he built the vicarage, restored the a specimen of the class in the sketch, " The Gauger's Pocket." dignity of divine worship in the ancient church dedicated to Tristram Pentire was " the last of the smugglers;" it was in St. John the Baptist, and gradually won the hearts of his vain that Mr. Hawker tried to persuade him that a revenue-

somewhat lawless parishioners. In his own words :— officer or " gauger " was a lawful authority. The Vicar found

My parish was a domain of about seven thousand acres, bounded breaker. " There had been divers parsons," he assured me, on the landward border by the course of a curving river (the "in his time in the parish, and very learned clergy they were' Tamar), which had its source with a sister-stream in a moorland and some very strict ; and some would preach one doctrine spring within my territory, and, flowing southward, divided two and some another ; and there was one that had very mean counties in its descent to the sea. My seaward boundary was a stretch of bold and rocky shore, an interchange of lofty headland notions about running goods, and said 'twas a wrong thing to and deep and sudden gorge, the cliffs varying from 300 ft. to do ; but even he, and the rest, never took part with the gauger 450 ft. of perpendicular or gradual height, and the valleys gushing —never !" The waves beat fiercely on those pitiless cliffs, with torrents, which bounded rejoicingly towards the sea, and

and dissenters of various hues Mine was a perilous war-

fare. If I had not, like the Apostle, to fight wild beasts at Ephe-

their Founder cannot fail to be fulfilled. It was never prophesied

knelt before the altar to pray for them, and of course took it " Save a stranger from the sea, as the most natural thing in the world when the rooks came." And he'll turn your enemy ; "

oldest arches of the church in ancient Cornwall." The descent " Stand, silent image, stately stand !

into the church is by three steps,—" Every church dedicated to Where sighs shall breathe and tears be shed ; John the Baptizer is thus arranged. We go down into them, And many a heart of Cornish land as those about to be baptised of John went down into the They came in paths of storm—they found

water." The strange old carvings and mouldings, the " Grin This quiet home in Christian ground." A lonely sanctuary of the Saxon days, Reared by the Severn Sea for prayer and praise,— Amid the carved work of the roof a vine.

Its root is where the eastern sunbeams fall More and more grapes, until the growth bath gone " Trevanion is up, and Godolphin is nigh : Through arch and aisle. Hearken ! and heed the sign ; And gather from that tree a parable divine ! "

'Mid the names and the nobles of Devon ;— Legends, visions, and dreams, were living realities to him ; But if truth to the King be a signal, why then he would relate experiences of the " evil eye," in which he was Ye can find out the Granville in heaven." a firm believer, or visions, such as St. Morwenna appearing

But, in addition to his stirring ballads, his lyrics, and to him and reproaching him for not having observed a day

" I found myself the first resident vicar for more than a century. that in defending the law he had much offended the law- leaped at last amid a cloud of spray into the waters. So stern and the scanty hedgerow-trees have their heads bent to one side pitiless is this iron-bound coast, that within the memory of one by the prevailing south-westerly gales, and the tale of wrecks man upwards of eighty wrecks have been counted within a reach is large. In olden days the coast-men hung out false lights of fifteen miles, with only here and there the rescue of a living to lure ships on the rocks, and rejoiced when a good vessel man. My people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers, went to pieces. " I do not see why it is," said a Cornish clerk

" '

one day, why there be prayers in the Buke o Common sus,' I had to soothe the wrecker, to persuade the smuggler, and Prayer for rain and for fine weather, and thanksgivings for to handle serpents,' in my intercourse with adversaries of many them and for peace, and there's no prayer for wrecks and a kind. Thank God ! the promises which the clergy inherit from

thanksgiving for a really gude one when it is come !" It was

that they should be popular, or wealthy, or successful among men ; in those days that the minister of a parish is said to have but only that they should endure to the end,' that their gene- held a lanthorn while his congregation effected " a landing," ration should never pass away.' Well has this word been kept !" and that a cargo of kegs was hidden under the benches of the

The Vicar must have been a strangely picturesque figure, church. We bribed the sexton," so the legend ran, "and we

both in his ordinary garb of cassock, brimless hat of flesh- had the goods safe in the seats by Saturday night. The coloured beaver or purple wide-awake, and crimson gloves, parson did wonder at the large congregation, for divers of and in his rougher attire of claret-coloured coat, blue fisher- them were not regular churchgoers at other times ; and if he man's jersey and long sea-boots ; but children, birds, and had known what was going on, he could not have preached re animals confided in him, and cared nothing for his odd appear- more suitable discourse, for it was, Be not drunk with wine, anee. Mr. Baring-Gould tells of the tame black pig Gyp ; ' wherein is excess' One of his beat sermons ; but there, it of the nine cats that followed him into church ; of the birds did not touch us, you see, for we never tasted anything but that came to be fed, and fluttered fearlessly round him ; and brandy or gin." of the children who demanded long stories of saints and Mr. Hawker gives a graphic account of the first wreck after heroes. " He loved birds," says Mr. J. A. Noble, in an essay his arrival in the parish. He restored an exhausted seaman, recently published, " for their own sake, but also because they and insisted on taking him to the vicarage, notwithstanding the reminded him of angels—' Ubi aces, ibi Angeli' was a saying remonstrances of a parishioner, who quoted a saying on the of his—and when he wanted rooks to settle in his grove he coast,—

Like St. Francis of Assisi,— illustrating the quotation by the history of one Coppinger,

" But most of all the birds whose exploits were afterwards chronicled by the Vicar. " My He loved, the swift-winged messengers who pass first funeral of those lost mariners was a touching and striking 'Twixt earth and Heaven, and seem as if they bear scene. . The three bodies first found were buried at the same

A double nature, close in brotherhood time. Behind the coffins, as they were solemnly borne along

With all he loved." the aisle, walked the solitary mourner, Le Daine, weeping

His reverent faith in the unseen, his love of symbolism and bitterly and aloud." The figure-head of the lost brig ' Cale- mysticism, is evident in his writings. He describes with most donia ' stands by the graves of her crew in the little church- loving detail his little " Morwenna's church" with its "three yard :—

Will soften for the stranger-dead.

of Arius" on the curve of an arch, the rose and lily, the It is sad to turn from the pages brimming over with pie- double-necked eagle, the five-angled sigil of Solomon, the six- turesque pathos and humour, to the shadows of illness, shattered nerves, and money difficulties that clouded Mr. Hawker's latter days, and the painful discussion that arose after his death, as to his having been received into the Roman Communion on his death-bed. We gain our best knowledge of him from his own writings. There we find the earnest, devoted parish priest building vicarage and school, repairing his church, anxious to train his people in his own way, a little apt to pursue his hobbies too eagerly, but beloved by those he cared most to befriend,—a lover of Nature, a seer of visions and dreamer of dreams, a believer in witches, fairy- rings, the evil-eye, and the effects of ill-wishing, but withal a poet, imaginative and mystical, burthened with that sense of loneliness that is so often the pathetic outcome of an intel- lect lifted above its ordinary compeers, yet with a practical side to his nature, the one element that saved the balance. His anti- pathy to Dissenters and to the Ritualists was very strong. Mr. Baring-Gould repeats the well-known story of a Dissenting parishioner who gave her reason for burying her husband in another parish :—" Well, Sir, we thought as you were so mightily particular, you would object to bury a Dissenter." "On the contrary," said the Vicar, "I should be but too happy to bury you all " Weakened in body and mind by long illness, anxieties, and the effects of opium-taking, Mr. Hawker had a paralytic stroke in August, 1875, and died in a few days. He was buried in Plymouth cemetery, far away from his beloved Morwenstow. The memories he has preserved still remain to us ; the cliffs and moors of his native Cornish land are peopled for us by saints, heroes, smugglers, and supernatural visitants ; their footprints, in his vigorous verse and picturesque prose, alike lit up by the " light of other days."