Historian
In 1834 Hallam published The Remains in Prose and Verse of Arthur Henry Hallam, with a Sketch of his Life. In 1852 a selection of Literary Essays and Characters from the Literature of Europe was published.
The Middle Ages is described by Hallam himself as a series of historical dissertations, for the period from the 5th to the 15th century. The work consists of nine long chapters: the histories of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and of the Greek and Saracenic empires, fill five chapters. Others deal with major institutional features of medieval society: the feudal system, the ecclesiastical system, and the political system of England. The last chapter sketches society, 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, namely the accession of Henry VII, and carries it down to the accession of George III. Hallam stopped here because he was unwilling to touch on issues of contemporary politics which seemed to him to run back through the whole period of the reign of George III; and he was accused of bias. The Quarterly Review for 1828 contains a hostile article on the Constitutional History, written by Southey, full of reproach: the work, he said, is the "production of a decided partisan." It was his distant treatment of Charles I, Cranmer and Laud that provoked the indignation of Southey.
Hallam, like Macaulay, ultimately referred political questions to the standard of Whig constitutionalism. But he was conscientious with his materials; and it was this which made the Constitutional History one of the standard text-books of English politics.
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Famous quotes containing the word historian:
“Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
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“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
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