WE know Sir John Hawkins was " un- clubbable," and
we know that he got his revenge on Johnson for the epithet by writing the Doctor's life ; beyond that, and a few scattered references in the pages of Boswell, most of us do not go. But now comes Dr. Percy Scholes in a brave attempt to bring Hawkins to life. The attempt fails, mainly because everything anyone would ever want to know about the worthy but dull knight could be got into ten thousand words —and to be quite frank Dr. Scholes gives us little more, for the rest of his book is made up of digressions which though interesting are not particularly relevant. A lecture before the Royal Society of Literature is about as much as Hawkins is worth, though an interesting hour can be spent turning over the pages of his life of Johnson, which is by no means as bad as those who haven't read it make out. Like Arthur Murphey's essay, it views the Doctor through spectacles entirely untinted with rose. One cannot help feeling that the well-deserved success of his biography of Dr. Burney has led Dr. Scholes to suppose that one historian of music is as good a biographical subject as another, a conclusion which comparison of the two books sufficiently disproves. There is a good deal of interest in the later work, but the figure of Hawkins himself stalks aloofly through its pages and remains obstinately
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