HALLAM’S “Literary Essays and Characters,” published in 1852, are made up of selections from his “Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries,”—a work which, until Taine’s “History of English Literature” appeared, held the first place among books of its class. Hallam’s style is as unlike Taine’s as possible and his method is the antithesis of Taine’s, but he preceded, if he did not instruct, Taine in the classical method of dividing and subdividing a great subject into essays forming its topical units, so that each topic is presented in its wholeness, as well as in its connection with the larger whole. Hallam’s “Literature of Europe”—which the general public has accepted as his masterpiece—becomes, as a result of this method, a true sequence of essays, each of which has an individuality of its own, while in many of them this individuality is so well defined that they are fully as capable of standing alone, outside of their connection, as any detached literary essay of De Quincey or Macaulay. As an essayist, Hallam deals in facts to a much greater extent than Macaulay or any of those essayists who formed their style as critical reviewers. His work represents original research, wide and deep. Professor Edward Robinson says that “in science and theology, mathematics and poetry, metaphysics and law, he is a competent and always a fair, if not a profound, critic,” and adds that “the great qualities displayed in his work, conscientiousness, accuracy, and enormous reading, have been universally acknowledged.” This is especially true of the “History of European Literature,” which shows a range of reading equaled only by Gibbon. Hallam’s “View of the Middle Ages” and his “Constitutional History of England” trace the development of modern England from the Feudal system to its present form of aristocratic constitutional government. It lacks the general interest which Blackstone knows how to give to even the most abstract subject, but it has become a recognized authority among English lawyers and public men, and if it is seldomer read than the “History of European Literature,” it is not less widely distributed in England and America. In both countries, Hallam holds his place on the shelves with Gibbon, as he deserves to do because of a faculty of amassing and using details in which Gibbon alone surpasses him.

  Hallam was born at Windsor, England, in 1777. After taking his degree at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1799, he studied at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar; but although his knowledge of the principles of law was profound, he never practiced his profession. His life was devoted to literature and to the historical research which appears so unmistakably in his three great works: “A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages,” 1818; “The Constitutional History of England,” 1827; and the “Introduction to the Literature of Europe,” eleven years later. His eldest son, Arthur Henry Hallam, a young man of brilliant promise, died at the age of twenty-one, and was immortalized by Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” In 1834 Hallam published “The Remains in Prose and Verse of Arthur Henry Hallam, with a Sketch of His Life.” The “Literary Essays and Characters” already referred to followed this as the last of his important publications. He died January 21st, 1859, surviving all the great Whigs of the first half of the century except Macaulay, who died in December of the same year, and Brougham, who lingered in second childhood until 1868. Although Hallam took no direct part in politics, he was himself one of the “great Whigs” of his generation, but his Whiggery involved no leaning towards Democracy. He believed in the English constitution as an evolution of national character and in Aristocracy as a part of it, but he had the genuine Whig hatred of despotism. His death and that of Macaulay in the same year left the potent Whig idea of the eighteenth century without adequate representation in the literature of England during the second half of the nineteenth century. Old school Whiggery was succeeded by a quarter of a century of “Liberalism” which, as its logic worked out at the close of the century, has demonstrated itself as something far less masculine than the political idea, which from the days of Chatham to the middle of the nineteenth century was so decisive a factor in the progress of the world.