When the vicar of Morwenstow liked, he could fire off a pungent epigram. Many of these productions exist; but, as most of them apply to persons or events with whom or with which the general reader has no acquaintance, it is not necessary to quote them. Some also are too keenly sharpened to bear publication.
The Hon. Newton Fellowes[[35]] canvassed for North Devon, at the time when the surplice controversy was at its height, and went before the electors as the champion of Protestantism, and “no washing of the parson’s shirt.”
On the hustings he declared with great vehemence that he “would never, never, never allow himself to be priest-ridden.” Mr. Hawker heard him, and, tearing a leaf from his pocket-book, wrote on it:—
Thou ridden ne’er shalt be, by prophet or by priest:
Balaam is dead, and none but he would choose thee for his beast!
And he slipped the paper into the hand of the excited but not eloquent speaker.
He had a singular facility for writing off an epigram on the spur of the moment. In the midst of conversation he would pause, his hand go to the pencil that dangled from his button-hole, and on a scrap of paper, the fly-leaf of a book, or a margin of newspaper, a happy, brilliant epigram was written on some topic started in the course of conversation, and composed almost without his pausing in his talk.
Many of his sayings were epigrammatical. On an extremely self-conceited man leaving the room one day, after he had caused some amusement by his self-assertion, Mr. Hawker said: “Conceit is the compensation afforded by benignant Nature for mental deficiency.”
His “Carol of the Pruss,” 1st Jan., 1871, is bitter:—
Hurrah for the boom of the thundering gun!