Henry Hawkins deserves to be remembered if only because he lived to be an old man. After more than twenty-five years of active but unostentatious service as a Jesuit priest in the London area, he died on 14 August 1646 at the House of the English Tertian Fathers in Ghent, aged about seventy years. But apart from the achievement of keeping his body intact and relatively free for a quarter of a century on the English Mission, Hawkins should be known, too, for his literary works—two original and six substantial translations from Latin, French and Italian. From the earliest days of the English Catholic struggle for survival, the particular need of the isolated English ‘Papists’ for spiritual reading in order to sustain faith, had been recognized and many attempts were made to meet it. For Catholics at home, largely deprived of sacraments, worship and instruction through homily, it was one of the only ways of keeping in touch with the Church's devotional life and one of the few channels of encouragement. Hawkins's work is not apologetical; he does not try to supply the need for doctrinal instruction nor does he in any way enter the dogmatic or political conflict.