The Sun.
London, England, 1859-01-24 00:00:00

HENRY ILALLA.II.

The constellation of writers who shed a radiance
on the early part of the present century is fast
vanishing away. Not the least remarkable of these,
the historian of the Middle Ages, of the Revival of
Letters and of the English Constitution, Henry
Hallam, died on Saturday last, at the great age of
81. He has left but few of his companions behind
him, and, more than this, it was his bitter fate to
outlive those who should have come after him, to
_ _

see two sons of rare promise, who should have pre-
served his name,.go' before him, the pride of his
life. snatched from his eyes, the delight of his old
age laid low in the dust of death. One of these
was that Arthur Henry Hallam, who' died in 1833,
arid to whom TennyEon dedicated the remarkable
series of poems which have been published under
the title of "In Memoriam." The bereaved father
was broken-hearted for his son, and spoke of his
hopes on this side the tomb being struck down- for
ever: A year or two afterwards, when he produced
the-" Introduction to the Literature of Europe,"
there appeared a most affecting passage in the pre-
face, which to those who knew him, suggested the
hidden grief that was .preying on his mind. He
referred to the imperfection of his work, to the im-
possibility of rendering it complete under any cir-
cumstances, and to the especial impossibility of his
doing so. "I have other warnings," he said, "to
bind up my sheaves while I may—my own advanc-
ing years, _ and. the gathering in the .heavens."
His hopes, however, revived .as his younger son
grew up to manhood. and "scenic& to promise not
lets than the' accemplished•youth whom his father
had regarded, and .not without. reason, as an only
one without a fellow. But this son also, Henry
Fitzmaurice Hallam, was taken from him shortly
after he had been called to the bar in 1850; and the
poor bereaved father buried. him in Clevedon
Church, in Somersetshire, by the side of his brother,
and. his sister, and his mother. He. selected the
place, as he says in his memoir of the eldest son,
" not only from the connection a kindred, but on
account of its still and sequestered situation on a
lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel." It
is to this hill, and to this channel, and. to this graVe
to which now the remains of the old, heartbroken
father are to be added, that Tennyson refers in the
most pathetic of his poems,—

" And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill!
But, 0 for the touch of a vanished hand.
And the sound of a voice that is still
" Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, 0 sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
It is to the same place of rest that the poet refers
in the following description, in which he collects
together all. the images of stillness, order, and
solemnity :--
" The Danube to the Severn gave
The darkened heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave. -
cc Thera twiceit-dey the ge4errt fins, Li ‘,ii
The salt sea water passes ly,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills."
Among historians we doubt whether there is. to
be found one equal to Mr. Hallam in impartiality.
There have been historians as erudite
,as he, not
less acute, more inspiring as thinkers more elegant
as writers.; but for stern justice he is probably
without a rival. His unflinching integrity,, his
subjugation of personal prejudice, his determination
to speak the truth under all -circumstances is one of
the rarest things in literature. This perfect frank-
ness never takes in him the form, which it assumes
in minds less accurately balanced, of an imPatient
desire to speak unpalatable truths 'in season and
out of season: Perhaps there never was a critic
who was so little of an egotist, and whose judgment
was so little swayed by personal feelings, either of
regard for himself or of regard: for others. Here,
indeed; one might detect a want in his character
as a writer—a want which might scarcely have
been observed when he began to write, but which
became apparent in his later years, when the
tendencies of the age had introduced a new style
of history and of criticism. He belonged to 'that
school which in history deals with principles
rather than with persons, and in criticism deals
with poems rather than with poets, books rather
than with authors. The tendency of our litera-
ture of late years has been in a direction entirely
opposite. and would seem to represent principles
as subordinate to the personages by whom they
are illustrated, books as but secondary to the
authors from whose pens they have flowed—a ten-
dency, in fact, which would render biography the
base of history, the base of criticism, the base even
of philosophy. So strongly has this tendency made
itself manifest in our later literature that the pecu-
liarity of Hallam's manner appears in most start-
ling contrast, and those who have been null". ed
under the more recent system may not be able to
enjoy the dry details and impersonal reasonings of
the old school. Mr. Hallam, however, in striving
to be a classical historian, has shown but little
ambition to be a popular one. His works are more
for the student than the idle reader. The student
finds in them a mine of wealth—unbounded erudi-
tion, accuracy that has never been impugned, a wise
judgment that almost always leaves one satisfied, a
brevity of statement that prevents exhaustion, and
an elegance of style that draws him along. The
reader for mere pleasure would never go through
one of Mr. Hallam's works ; and yet in all his
writings there are passages instinct with fine feel-
ing which might well fix the attention of the most
desultory reader. Never writing for effect, but
conscientiously and laboriously striving to elicit
the bare truth, this great historian, whose works
are as valuable as any of the same kind that have
ever been written, often attains without seeking it
an effect which the masters of popular applause
might envy.
There are few literary men who have reached an
eminence to be compared with that of Mr. Hal-
lam, of whose personal history so little is known to
the great public. That he was born in or about
1778, that he was educated at Eton, that from
Eton he passed to. Christ Church, Oxford, and that
at this University he took his degree in 1799, are
almost all the• facts of his early life which have been
publishe4.- After living the University he took
up his residence in London, joined himself to the
Whigs', and acquired his first reputation as a con-
tributor to the great Whig Review established in
the northern metropolis. It was on account of his
supposed connection with the Edinburgh Review
that he incurred the wrath of Byron, who, in that
satire in which he first of all showed his power,
referred in ironical terms to " the classic Hallam,
much renowned for Greek." Greek, however, was
not the peculiar study of our historian, who set
himself the task of learning all the Europesi lan-
guages of importance as the steppingstone to an
acquaintance with the state of Europe during the
Middle Ages. He quietly settled down to his work,
marrying in the meantime, and in 1811 rejoicing
in the birth of his little Arthur, who was such a
marvel of a child that at the age of seven he learnt
to read Latin with fluency in a year. It was amid
this domestic happiness and the repose which it
provided that, in 1818, he at length gave to the world
the first, and, perhaps, the greatest of his works, the
View of the State of Europe during the Middle
Ages"--a work which, although somewhat expel'.
sive and by no means adapted to the popular taste,
has gone through a dozen editions. In every page
of this history we are struck with the enormous in-
dustry . and the conscientiousness of the writer,
which in union with his sagacity of thought and
pith of composition have rendered every work pro-
duced by him standard of its kind. He waited nine
years and then gave to the world his " Constitu-
tional History of England from the Accession of
Henry VII. to the death of George II." Nothing
can be more masterly than the manner in which he
has here traced the history of the
English
consti-
tution from its first faint beginnings to its perfect
development. It is a vast treasury of political
thought—an armoury of political facts ; in itself the
Magna Charta of our liberty and our rights, which
bears the sign-manual, not of Kings or their Minis-
ters, but of the Muse of History. 'After these pub-
lications Mr. Hallam turned from political to lite-
rary history, preparing to write a full account of
the revival of letters and the various steps by which
a literature came to be cultivated in the vernacular
in
languages of Europe. It was while engaged h
this work, and while his heart was full of joy in t e
acquirements of his elder son, who had just left
College, and who, under his father's was now
studying the " Institutes" of Justinian eye,
and the
"Commentaries" of Blackstone, now writing short
papers for various works,revis of Tennyson for a
magazine, biographies of Burke and Voltaire for
the Portrait Gallery of the Useful Knowledge So-
ciety, that the great affliction came which seemed
for a time to prostrate the historian, and which
certainly gave a mellowness to his habits of thought
as well as a depth of feeling to his whole character
that had the happiest influence on his critical dis-
quisitions.
If it be true of the poets that " they lox? in suf-
fering what they teach in song," it is not less true