A TRUE CORNISH MAN" AND HIS WIFE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 216, 15 June 1877, Page 13

A TRUE CORNISH MAN" AND HIS WIFE.

AX ■ Among the many distinguished members of the Anglican Clerical body who have of late years joined the Church, few are more worthy of notice than the late Mr. Hawker, Vicar of Morwanstow, in Cornwall. He was seventy years of age when he entered the Church. He was a poet of no mean order. His ballads on Sir Jonathan Trelawny, one of the seven Bishops imprisoned by James 11 , was at first published anonymously, and both Lord Macaulay and Sir Walter Scott supposed it to be an ancient one. They greatly admired it. He was also a contributor to many periodicals. He long clung to the High Church section of the Established Church. There was much to pain him in the conflicting teaching and denial of vital truths countenanced by English Bishops and Courts, which, says his biographer, Dr. Lee, "have shaken the faith of thousands; and sent hundreds of our most devoted, learned, and self-sacrificing clergy and thousands of our laity to the ranks of the Church of Rome." " There is scarcely," adds Dr. Lee, " a family in England among the aristocracy and gentry in which one or more converts are not to be found." A year before his death Mr. Hawker wrote the following curious letter to a friend : — " A traveller in Yorkshire in 1852 encountered on a moor a person who seemed to him to be a pedlar carrying a pack. They sat down on a rock and conversed. Said the stranger : *In 50 years from this time the great mass of the English people will be divided into two armies, and their names will be Catholic and Infidel.' The traveller knew not who the stranger might be, nor did he touch him so far as to ascertain that he was really a man. Soon after — but how he could not tell — he had glided away. I read this book of travels and have often thought of it since." I wonder what the note writer in the Otago Witness would say to this " apparition." Mr. Hawker visited f~ his brother, Mr. Claud Hawker, of Penally, Boscastle, and returning home by way of Plymouth, he was unable to proceed further and lay down to die in the old town that 70 years before had witnessed bis birth. There he was received into the Catholic Church by Canon Mansefield. Twelve hours after he peacefully expired on the feast of the Assumption. He left a beloved wife, who some time before had entered the Church, and whose sole ambition, as Bhe said, was that her three little girls might grow up good Catholics, and do what they could to " spread the faith in that tardy and desolate Cornish land, whose people were the last to abandon it, and under the inscrutable ruling of Divine Providence, seemed, likely to be the last to return to it again." Laic.