Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associated in the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian. It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly stock, and came of “the Park branch” of that house. The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this fact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the material for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier. Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the General the likeness was curiously strong. Nominated by one of his uncles to Christ’s Hospital, Hake entered that famous school. He gives in his ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ a very vivid picture of it and also a really vital portrait of himself. From his very childhood he was haunted by a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion. It lasted till the very hour of his death. When eleven years of age he became acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for more than three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespeare moths of English literature have been flying. The Shakespearean of eleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts from Davenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of our contemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratford bust. The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the late Dion Boucicault, who did so without trying. But Shakespeare’s wonderful work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally humorous way. “Shakespeare’s perfection,” he says in his memoirs, “not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in turn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I might live.” Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, it must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism” is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, that vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils of those who turn from “modernity” to poetic art. Nor was Hake’s feeling akin to that fine despair Before the foreheads of the gods of song