HAYWARD, ABRAHAM (1801-1884), translator of Goethe and author of The Art of Dining, was born at Wilton, near Salisbury. Educated at Blundell's school, Tiverton, he entered the Inner Temple in 1824, and was called to the bar in June 1832. Hayward edited the Law Magazine from 1829 to 1844, and be came a conspicuous figure in London literary society. His trans lation of Goethe's Faust was privately printed in 1833, and a re vised edition appeared in 1834. In Feb. 1835 he was elected to the Athenaeum club under Rule II., and he remained for nearly 5o years one of its most conspicuous and most influential members. He was also a subscriber to the Carlton, but ceased to frequent it when he became a Peelite. At the Temple, Hayward, whose reputation was rapidly growing as a connoisseur not only of a bill of fare (the famous Art of Dining appeared in 1852) but also (as Swift would have said) of a bill of company, gave famous dinners, at which ladies of fashion appreciated the wit of Sydney Smith and Theodore Hook, the dignity of Lockhart and Lynd hurst and the oratory of Macaulay. At the Athenaeum and in political society he to some extent succeeded to the position of Croker. His sharp pen made him many enemies. He disgusted the friends of Mill by the stories he raked up for an obituary notice of the great economist (The Times, May so, 1873). He broke with Henry Reeve in 1874 by a venomous review of the Greville Memoirs, in which Reeve was compared to the beggarly Scot deputed to let off the blunderbuss which Bolingbroke (Greville) had charged. Samuel Warren attacked him (very unjustly, for Hayward was anything but a parasite) as Venom Tuft in Ten Thousand a Year; and Disraeli aimed at him partially in Ste. Barbe (in Endymion), though the satire here was directed pri marily against Thackeray. After his break with Reeve, Hayward devoted himself more exclusively to the Quarterly. He died in London on Feb. 2, 1884.
Two volumes of Hayward's Correspondence (edited by H. E. Carlisle) were published in 1886. In Vanity Fair (Nov. 27, 1875) he may be seen as he appeared in later life.