On 10 April 1744 he proceeded M.A., and, when Robert Lowth vacated the professorship of poetry in 1751, Hawkins succeeded to the chair (6 June 1751 to 1756).
Early in life Hawkins contributed pieces to magazines, and in 1743, when he was only twenty-one, he published his first work, The Thimble, an heroi-comical Poem in four cantos, by a Gentleman of Oxford, which was reissued in the following year.
This imitation of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock was dedicated toAnna Maria Woodford, 'the compleatest housewife in Europe.'
Of a third play, the Siege of Aleppo, which was never acted, Hawkins alleged that it had met the approval of 'Judge Blackstone, Mr. Smart of Cambridge, Mr. Samuel Johnson, and Mr. Thomas Warton.'
David Garrick, to whom it was submitted, rejected the piece as 'wrong in the first concoction,’ and an account of his quarrel with its author appears in Boswell's Johnson.
Hawkins accounted for the rejection of his pieces by alleging that he had given Garrick some offence in connection with the previous play of 'Henry and Rosamond.'
A volume issued in 1754 under the pseudonym of Gyles Smith, containing 'Serious Reflections on the Dangerous Tendency of the Common Practice of Card-playing,’ is attributed to Hawkins.