In after-years, when Jeune, Jacobson, and Macbride were heads of colleges, Robert S. Hawker went up to Oxford in his cassock and gown. The cassock was then not worn, as it sometimes is now, except by heads of colleges and professors. Mr. Hawker was therefore singular in his cassock. He was outside St. Mary's one day, with Drs. Jeune, Jacobson, and Macbride, when a friend, looking at him in his gown and cassock, said, "Why, Hawker, one would think you wanted to be taken for a head." "About the last thing I should like to be taken for, as heads go," was his ready reply, with a roguish glance at his three companions. Mr. Hawker has related another of his mischievous tricks when an undergraduate. There was a poor old woman named Nanny Heale, who passed for a witch. Her cottage was an old decayed hut, roofed with turf. One night Robert Hawker got on the roof, and, looking down the chimney, saw her crouching over her turf fire, watching with dim eyes an iron crock, or round vessel, filled with potatoes, that were simmering in the heat. This utensil was suspended by its swing handle to an iron bar that went across the chimney. Hawker let a rope, with an iron hook at the end, slowly and noiselessly down the chimney, and, unnoted by poor Nanny's blinking sight, caught the handle of the caldron; and it, with its mealy contents, began to ascend the chimney slowly and majestically. Nanny, thoroughly aroused by this unnatural proceeding of her old iron vessel, peered despairingly after it, and shouted at the top of her voice, Massy 'pon my sinful soul! art gawn off-taties and all?" The vessel was quietly grasped, and carried down in hot haste, and planted upright outside the cottage door. A knock, given on purpose, summoned the inmate, who hurried out, and stumbled over, as she afterwards interpreted the event, her penitent crock. "So, then," was her joyful greeting, "so, then! theer't come back to holt, then! Ay, 'tis a-cold out o' doors." Good came out of evil: for her story, which she rehearsed again and again, with all the energy and persuasion of truth, reached the ears of the parochial authorities; and they, thinking that old Nanny's wits had failed her, gave an additional shilling a week to her allowance. His vacations were spent at Whitstone, or at Ivy Cottage, near Bude. At Whitstone he built himself a bark shanty in the wood, and set up a life-sized carved wooden figure, which he had procured in Oxford, at the door, to keep it. The figure he called "Moses." It has long since disappeared, but the bark house remains. In this hut he was wont to read. His meals were brought out there to him. His intervals of work were spent in composing ballads on Cornish legends, afterwards published at Oxford in his "Records of the Western Shore," 1832. They have all been reprinted in later editions of his poems. One of these, his "Song of the Western Men," was adapted to the really ancient burden : "And shall they scorn Tre, Pol, and Pen, Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why!" 25 These verses have so much of the antique flavor, that Sir Walter Scott, in one of his prefaces to a later edition of the Border Minstrelsy, refers to them as a "remarkable example of the lingering of the true ballad spirit in a remote district;" and Mr. Hawker possessed a letter from Lord Macaulay in which he admitted that, until undeceived by the writer, he had always supposed the whole song to be of the time of the Bishops' trial. At Ivy Cottage he had formed for himself a perch on the edge of the cliff, where he could be alone with his books, his thoughts, and, as he would say with solemnity, "with God." Perhaps few thought then how deep were the religious impressions in the joyous heart, full of exuberant spirits, of the young Oxford student. All people knew of him was, that he was remarkable for his beauty, for his brightness of manner, his overflowing merriment, and love of playing tricks. But there was a deep undercurrent of religious feeling setting steadily in one direction, which was the main governing stream of his life. Gradually this emerges into sight, and becomes recognized. Then it was known to few except his wife and her sisters. At this period of his life, it is chiefly his many jests which have lingered on in the recollection of his friends and relations. One absurd hoax that he played on the supersti. tious people of Bude must not be omitted. At full moon in the July of 1825 or 1826, he swam or rowed out to a rock at some little distance from the shore, plaited seaweed into a wig, which he threw over his head, so that it hung in lank streamers halfway down his back, enveloped his legs in an oilskin wrap, and, otherwise naked, sat on the rock, flashing the moonbeams about from a hand-mirror, and sang and screamed till attention was arrested. Some people passing along the cliff heard and saw him, and ran into Bude, saying that a mermaid with a fish's tail was sitting on a rock, combing her hair, and singing. A number of people ran out on the rocks and along the beach, and listened awe-struck to the singing and disconsolate wailing of the mermaid. Presently she dived off the rock, and disappeared. Next night crowds of people assembled to look out for the mermaid; and in due time she re-appeared, and sent the moon flashing in their faces from her glass. Telescopes were brought to bear on her; but she sang on unmoved, braiding her tresses, and uttering remarkable sounds, unlike the singing of mortal throats which have been practised in do-re-mi. This went on for several nights; the crowd growing greater, people arriving from Stratton, Kilkhampton, and all the villages round, till Robert Hawker got very hoarse with his nightly singing, and rather tired of sitting so long in the cold. He therefore wound up the performance one night with an unmistakable "God save the King,” then plunged into the waves, and the mermaid never again revisited the "sounding shores of Bude." Miss Fanny l'ans was a late riser. Her brotherin-law, to break her of this bad habit, was wont to throw open her window early in the morning, and turn in a troop of setters, whose barking, yelping, and frantic efforts to get out of the room again, effectually banished sleep from the eyes of the fair but somewhat aged occupant. Efford Farm had been sub-let to a farmer, who broke the lease by ploughing up and growing crops on land which it had been stipulated should be kept in grass. Sir Thomas Acland behaved with great generosity in the matter. He might have reclaimed the farm without making compensation to the ladies; but he allowed them three hundred pounds a year as long as they lived, took the farm away, and re-leased it to a more trusty tenant. .1 Mr. Robert Stephen Hawker obtained the Newdegate in 1827 he took his degree of B.A. in 1828, and then came with his wife to Morwenstow, a place for which even then he had contracted a peculiar love, and there read for holy orders. "Welcome, wild rock and lonely shore! The beacon of the Eternal Land." 1 The poem, "Pompeii," has been reprinted in his Echoes of Old Corn wall, Ecclesia, &c. |