British Victorian novelist, and collector of folk-song, Baring-Gould, is said to have had one of the most brilliant, eclectic minds of Victorian England and wrote over 100 books, including 30 novels. This work is a biography of the eccentric poet-vicar of Morwenstow, Robert Stephen Hawker. During his tenure he restored the church and parsonage, and established a school. From the many wrecks round the coast of his parish he rescued escaped sailors and buried the washed-up bodies of those who were drowned. He was also an enthusiastic student of the history and legends of the Cornish people, which he embodied in many prose essays as well as in his poems. He was a true poet, though, in the judgment of the best critics, he just missed being a great one.