HAWKER, ROBERT STEPHEN English antiquary and poet, was born at Stoke Damerel, Devonshire. He became vicar of Morwenstow, a village on the north Cornish coast, in 1834. He had an eccentric and powerful personality and was the original of Mortimer Collins's Canon Tremaine in Sweet and Twenty. He died in Plymouth on Aug. 15, 1875. Before his death he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church, a proceeding which aroused a bitter newspaper controversy. The best of his poems is The Quest of the Sangraal: Chant the First (Exeter, 1864). Among his Cornish Ballads (1869) the most fa mous is on "Trelawny," the refrain of which, "And shall Trelawny die," etc., he declared to be an old Cornish saying.
See The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (19o5) by his son-in-law, C. E. Byles, which contains a bibliography of his works, now very valuable to collectors. See also Boase and Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis. His Poetical Works (1 879) and his Prose Works (1893) were edited by J. G. Godwin. A complete edition of his poems by C. E. Byles, with the title Cornish Ballads and other Poems, appeared in 1904.