A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature/Hawker, Robert Stephen
Hawker, Robert Stephen (1804-1875).—Poet and antiquary, ed. at Cheltenham and Oxf., became parson of Morwenstow, a smuggling and wrecking community on the Cornish coast, where he exercised a reforming and beneficent, though extremely unconventional, influence until his death, shortly before which he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote some poems of great originality and charm, Records of the Western Shore (1832-36), and The Quest of the Sangraal (1863) among them, besides short poems, of which perhaps the best known is Shall Trelawny Die? which, based as it is on an old rhyme, deceived both Scott and Macaulay into thinking it an ancient fragment. He also pub. a collection of papers, Footprints of Former Men in Cornwall (1870).