“You are quoting my lines,” said the Poet Laureate.
“And thus it was,” as Mr. Hawker said when relating the incident, “that I learned whom I was entertaining.” He flattered himself that it was he who had introduced the Arthurian cycle of legends to Tennyson’s notice.
Charles Kingsley also owed to Mr. Hawker his first introduction to scenery which he afterwards rendered famous. Stowe and Chapel, places which figured so largely in Westward Ho! were explored by them together; and the vicar of Morwenstow was struck, as every one must have been struck who accompanied Mr. Kingsley under similar circumstances, by the wonderful insight and skill which seized at once on the most characteristic features of the scene, and found at the instant the fitting words in which to describe them.
Mr. Hawker, for his own part, not only did this for his own corner of Cornwall, but threw into his prose and his poetry the peculiar feeling of the district, the subtle aroma which, in less skilful hands, is apt to vanish altogether.
His ballads found their way into numerous publications without his name being appended to them, and sometimes were fathered on other writers. In a letter to T. Carnsew, Esq., dated 2nd January, 1858, he says as much.
My Dear Sir,—A happy New Year to yours and you, and many of them! as we say in the West. The kind interest you have taken in young Blight’s book[[19]] induces me to send you the royal reply to my letter. Through Col. Phipps to the Queen I sent a simple statement of the case, and asked leave for the youth to be allowed to dedicate his forthcoming book to the Duke of Cornwall. I did not, between ourselves, expect to succeed, because no such thing has hitherto been permitted, and also because I was utterly unknown, thank God, at Court. But it has been always my fate to build other people’s houses. For others I usually succeed; for myself, always fail. Let me tell you one strange thing. Every year of my life for full ten years I have had to write to some publisher, editor or author, to claim the paternity of a legend or a ballad or a page of prose, which others have been attempting to foist on the public as their own. Last year I had to rescue a legendary ballad—“The Sisters of Glennecten”—from the claims of a Mr. H. of Exeter College.[[20]] Yesterday I wrote for the January number of Blackwood, wherein I see published “The Bells of Bottreaux,” a name and legend which, if any one should claim, I say with Jack Cade, “He lies, for I invented it myself!”
“The Silent Tower of Bottreaux” is one of his best ballads. To the poem he appends the following note:[[21]] “The rugged heights that line the seashore in the neighbourhood of Tintagel Castle and Church are crested with towers. Among these, that of Bottreaux Castle, or, as it is now written, Boscastle, is without bells. The silence of this wild and lonely churchyard on festive or solemn occasions is not a little striking. On inquiring as to the cause, the legend related in the text was told me, as a matter of implicit belief in those parts.”
THE SILENT TOWER OF BOTTREAUX.
Tintagel bells ring o’er the tide:
The boy leans on his vessel’s side;