Born, in London, 30 March, 1719. Articled to an attorney. Contrib. to “Gentleman’s Mag.,” from 1739. Mem. of Madrigal Soc., 1741 (?). Perhaps contrib. anonymously to “Universal Spectator,” 1747. Mem. of Academy of Ancient Music. Married Sidney Storer, 1753. Gave up business as attorney, 1769. J.P. for Middlesex, 1761; Chairman of Quarter Sessions, 19 Sept. 1765. Knighted, 23 Oct. 1772. Died, in Westminster, 21 May, 1789; buried in cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Works: “Observations on the State of the Highways,” 1763; “The Principles and Power of Harmony” (anon.), 1771; “The General History of the Science and Practice of Music” (5 vols.), 1776; “Dissertation on the Armorial Ensigns of the County of Middlesex,” 1780; “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” 1787. Posthumous: Contribution to “Poetical Miscellanies” (anon.), 1790. He edited: Walton’s “Compleat Angler,” 1760; Johnson’s Works, 1787–89.

Personal

  “Why really I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but to be sure he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.”

The fiddling Knight.

  I met Dr. Percy, Bishop of Dromore, at Sir Joshua Reynolds’…. The bishop concurred with every other person I have heard speak of Hawkins, in saying that he was a most detestable fellow. He was the son of a carpenter, and set out in life in the very lowest line of the law. Dyer knew him well at one time, and the bishop heard him give a character of Hawkins once that painted him in the blackest colours; though Dyer was by no means apt to deal in such portraits. Dyer said he was a man of the most mischievous, uncharitable, and malignant disposition, and that he knew instances of his setting a husband against a wife, and a brother against a brother; fomenting their animosity by anonymous letters…. Sir Joshua observed that Hawkins, though he assumed great outward sanctity, was not only mean and groveling in disposition but absolutely dishonest. After the death of Dr. Johnson, he as one of his executors laid hold of his watch and several trinkets, coins, etc., which he said he should take to himself for his trouble—a pretty liberal construction of the rule of law, that an executor may satisfy his own demands in the first instance. Sir Joshua and Sir Wm. Scott, the other executors, remonstrated against this, and with great difficulty compelled him to give up the watch, which Dr. Johnson’s servant, Francis Barber, now has; but the coins and old pieces of money they could never get.

  Sir John Hawkins was originally bred a lawyer, in which profession he did not succeed. Having married a gentlewoman who by her brother’s death proved a considerable fortune he bought a house at Twickenham, intending to give himself up to his studies and music, of which he was very fond. He now commenced a justice of peace; and being a very honest, moral man, but of no brightness, and very obstinate and contentious, he grew hated by the lower class and very troublesome to the gentry, with whom he went to law both on public and private causes; at the same time collecting materials indefatigably for a “History of Music.”

  “And Sir John Hawkins,” exclaimed Uncle Timothy, with unwonted asperity, “whose ideas of virtue never rose above a decent exterior and regular hours! calling the author of the ‘Traveller’ an idiot! It shakes the sides of splenetic disdain to hear this Grub Street chronicler of fiddling and fly-fishing libelling the beautiful intellect of Oliver Goldsmith!”

  He had been an attorney for many years, affecting literary tastes, and dabbling in music at the Madrigal Club; but, four years before the present, so large a fortune had fallen to him in right of his wife, that he withdrew from the law, and lived and judged with severe propriety as a Middlesex magistrate. Within two years he will be elected chairman of the sessions; after seven years more, will be made a knight; and, in four years after that will deliver himself of five quarto volumes of a history of music, in the slow and laborious conception of which he is already painfully engaged. Altogether, his existence was a kind of pompous, parsimonious, insignificant drawl, cleverly ridiculed by one of the wits in an absurd epitaph: “Here lies Sir John Hawkins, Without his shoes and stauckins.” To him belonged the original merit, in that age of penal barbarity and perpetual executions, of lamenting that in no less that fourteen cases it was still possible to cheat the gallows. Another of his favorite themes was the improvidence of what he called sentimental writers, at the head of whom he placed the author of “Tom Jones;” a book which he charged with having “corrupted the rising generation,” and sapped “the foundation of that morality which it is the duty of parents and all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young people.” This was his common style of talk. He would speak contemptuously of Hogarth as a man who knew nothing out of Covent-garden. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, he looked upon as “stuff;” and for the last three, as men “whose necessities and abilities were nearly commensurate,” he had a special contempt.

  Hawkins was as mean and parsimonious as he was pompous and conceited. He forebore to partake of the suppers at the club, and begged therefore to be excused from paying his share of the reckoning.

  Hawkins was a man of coarse fibre, absurdly proud of “my coach,” rough to inferiors, and humble to men like Walpole, but not without solid good qualities.

History of Music, 1776

  I have been three days at Strawberry, and have not seen a creature but Sir John Hawkins’s five volumes, the two last of which, thumping as they are, I literally did read in two days. They are old books to all intents and purposes, very old books; and what is new, is like old books, too, that is, full of minute facts that delight antiquaries…. My friend, Sir John, is a matter-of-fact man, and does now and then stoop very low in quest of game. Then he is so exceedingly religious and grave as to abhor mirth, except it is printed in the old black letter, and then he calls the most vulgar ballad pleasant and full of humour. He thinks nothing can be sublime but an anthem, and Handel’s choruses heaven upon earth. However, he writes with great moderation, temper and good sense, and the book is a very valuable one. I have begged his Austerity to relax in one point, for he ranks comedy with farce and pantomime. Now I hold a perfect comedy to be the perfection of human composition, and believe firmly that fifty Iliads and Æneids could be written sooner than such a character as Falstaff’s.

  In which, however, there is much original and valuable information, as in all his other works, so unjustly censured in my opinion. Sir John’s principal fault was digression from his subject; but if you excuse that, you are well repaid by the information you receive.

  Contemporary judgment awarded the palm of superiority to Burney and neglected Hawkins. Evidence of the feeling is found in a catch which was formerly better known than it is now:—

	“Have you Sir John Hawkins’ History?
	Some folks think it quite a mystery.
	Musick fill’d his wondrous brain.
	How d’ye like him? Is it plain?
	Both I’ve read and must agree,
	That Burney’s history pleases me.”

Which in performance is made to sound:—

	“Sir John Hawkins!
	Burn his history!
	How d’ye like him?
	Burn his history!
	Burney’s history pleases me,”

Posterity, however, has reversed the decision of the wits; Hawkins’ “History” has been re-printed, but Burney’s never reached a second edition. The truth lies between the extremes. Burney, possessed of far greater musical knowledge than Hawkins, better judgment, and a better style, frequently wrote about things which he had not sufficiently examined; Hawkins, on the other hand, more industrious and painstaking than Burney, was deficient in technical skill, and often inaccurate.

  Hawkins, though a worse writer than Burney, was a more painstaking antiquary, and his book has therefore a more permanent value for students of musical history.

Life of Samuel Johnson, 1787

  Mr. Urban:—Have you read that divine book, the “Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by Sir John Hawkins, Knt.?” Have you done anything but read it since it was first published? For my own part, I scruple not to declare that I could not rest till I had read it quite through, notes, digressions, index and all; then I could not rest till I had gone over it a second time. I begin to think that increase of appetite grows by what it is fed on; for I have been reading it ever since. I am now in the midst of the sixteenth perusal; and still I discover new beauties. I can think of nothing else; I can talk of nothing else. In short, my mind is become tumid, and longs to be delivered of those many and great conceptions with which it has laboured since I have been through a course of this most perfect exemplar of biography. The compass of learning, the extent and accuracy of information, the judicious criticism, the moral reflections, the various opinions, legal and political, to say nothing of that excess of candour and charity that breathe throughout the work, make together such a collection of sweets that the sense aches at them. To crown all, the language is refined to a degree of immaculate purity, and displays the whole force of turgid eloquence….

	Read Hawkins once, and you can read no more,
	For all books else appear so mean, so poor,
	Johnson’s a dunce; but still persists to read,
	And Hawkins will be all the books you need.

  He has thrown a heap of rubbish of his own over poor Johnson, which would have smothered any less gigantic genius.

  Sir John Hawkins, whose “Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,” 1787, comes next in importance to Mrs. Piozzi’s “Anecdotes,” has suffered considerably; and his book, which immediately after Johnson’s death was advertised as “forthcoming,” is, to use the words of a recent writer, “spoken of with contempt by many who have never taken the trouble to do more than turn over its leaves.” That the author seems to have been extremely unpopular can scarcely be denied.