  BEST known as the editor of The Adventurer—a periodical in imitation of the Spectator, Rambler, &c.—which appeared twice a week during the years 1752–54. Johnson, Warton, and others assisted him in this undertaking, which has the honour of being one of the first periodicals which have ventured to denounce the cruel barbarism of “Sport,” and the papers by Hawkesworth upon that subject are in striking contrast with the usual tone and practice of his contemporaries and, indeed, of our own times. In 1761 he published an edition of Swift’s writings, with a life which received the praise of Samuel Johnson (in his Lives of the Poets), and it is a passage in that book which entitles him to a place here. In 1773 he was entrusted by the Government of the day with the task of compiling a history of the recent voyages of Captain Cook. He also translated the Aventures de TÉlÉmaque of FÉnÉlon. The coarseness and repulsiveness of the dishes of the common diet seldom have been stigmatised with greater force than by Dr. Hawkesworth. His expressions of abhorrence are conceived quite in the spirit of Plutarch:— “Among other dreadful and disgusting images which Custom has rendered familiar, are those which arise from eating animal food. He who has ever turned with abhorrence from the skeleton of a beast which has been picked whole by birds or vermin, must confess that habit alone could have enabled him to endure the sight of the mangled bones and flesh of a dead carcase which every day cover his table. And he who reflects on the number of lives that have been sacrificed to sustain his own, should enquire by what the account has been balanced, and whether his life is become proportionately of more value by the exercise of virtue and by the superior happiness which he has communicated to [more] reasonable beings.” |
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