CHAP, vili.1 THE CLUB AND ITS FIRST MEMBERS.
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 Middle-
sex magistrate. Within two years he will be elected chair-
man 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 a'bsurd 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 than fourteen eases
it was still possible to cheat the gallows. Another of his
favourite 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 founda-
" tion of that morality which it is the duty of parents and
" all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young
" people." t This was his common style of talk. He would
speak contemptuously of Hogarth as a man who knew nothing
out of Covent Grarden. Eichardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
Sterne, he looked upon as " stuff;" and for the three last, as
* Gent. Mag. lix. 473. A lucky pun condemned Sir John Hawkins's sixteen
years' labour to long obscurity and oblivion. Some wag in the interest of Dr.
Burney's rival publication wrote the folio-wing catch, which Dr. Oallcott set to
music :
" Have you read Sir John Hawkins's History ?
" Some folks think it quite a mystery;
'' Both I have, and I aver
" That Burney's History I prefer."
Burn his History was straightway in every one's mouth; and the bookseller
practically took the advice by "wasting" the greater part of tie edition,
f Life of Johnson, 214, 215.