Henry Hallam

HALLAM, HENRY English historian, was the only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor and dean of Bristol, and was born on July 9, 1777. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1799. Called to the bar, he practised for some years on the Oxford circuit ; but his tastes were literary, and when, on the death of his father in 1812, he inherited a small estate in Lincolnshire, he gave himself up wholly to the studies of his life. His Whig connections won for him a well-paid and easy post of commissioner of stamps. He supported the abolition of the slave trade ; and he was through out his life a sincere upholder of Whig principles. General sym pathy was felt for him when he lost his two brilliant sons, Arthur Henry Hallam (d. 1833), the A.H.H. of Tennyson's In Memoriam, and Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam (d. 185o). Hallam was a fellow of the Royal Society and a trustee of the British Museum. He died on Jan. 21, 1859. His great reputation rests on three stand ard works: The View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818 ; supplementary note, 1848) ; Constitutional History of England (182 7) ; and Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the rsth, r6th and r7th Centuries The Middle Ages is made up of nine long chapters, each of which is a complete treatise. The history of France, of Italy, of Spain, of Germany and of the Greek and Saracenic empires, sketched in rapid and general terms, is the subject of five separate chapters. Others deal with the great institutional features of mediaeval society—the development of the feudal system, of the ecclesiastical system and of the free political system of England. The last chapter sketches the general state of society, the growth of commerce, manners and literature in the middle ages.

The

Constitutional History of England takes up the subject at the point at which it had been dropped in the View of the Middle Ages, viz., the accession of Henry VII., and carries it down to the accession of George III. An unwillingness to excite the prejudices of modern politics, which withheld him from touching perhaps the most interesting period in the history of the Constitution, did not save him from a violent attack by Southey in the Quarterly Review, 18 28 ; he was accused "of heaping obloquy on all who supported the established institutions of the country." His chief unfairness was in tacitly assuming the 19th century theory of the Constitution to be the right theory in previous centuries, and that those who departed from it on one side or the other were in the wrong. But though his work is thus coloured by his opinions, this was not the outcome of a conscious purpose, and he was scrupu lously conscientious in collecting and weighing his materials. In this he was helped by his legal training, and the Constitutional History remains a standard authority.

Like the Constitutional History, the Introduction to the Litera ture of Europe continues one of the branches of inquiry opened in the View of the Middle Ages. The great qualities displayed in this work have been universally acknowledged—conscientiousness, accuracy, judgment and enormous reading. In science and the ology, mathematics and poetry, metaphysics and law, Hallam is a competent and always a fair if not a profound critic. The bent of his own mind is manifest in his treatment of pure literature and of political speculation—which seems to be inspired with stronger personal interest and a higher sense of power than other parts of his work display.

Hallam is generally described as a "philosophical historian." The description is worthy in that he fixed his attention on results rather than on persons. His conception of history embraced the whole movement of society. But sweeping theories of the govern ment of society, and broad characterizations of particular periods of history had no attraction for him. The view of mankind on which such generalizations are usually based, taking little account of individual character, was highly distasteful to him.