Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Crowned Masterpieces of Literature That Have Advanced Civilization, Vol. 6 of 10
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 Tesearch 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 is34 Hallam published The Remains in Prose and Verse of Arthur Henry Hal lam, with a Sketch of His Life. The Literary Essays and Charac ters already referred to followed this as the last of his important publications. He died January zlst, 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 sec ond 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 be lieved in the English constitution as an evolution of national charac ter 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 vjhig idea of the eighteenth century without ade quate 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. W. V. B.
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