, possessing also great literary tastes, much
industry, and considerable faculty both of judging and writing, united
almost all the qualifications for a high reputation; while his
abstinence from public affairs, and from participation in the violent
half-personal, half-political squabbles which were common among the
literary men of his day, freed him from most of the disadvantages, while
retaining for him all the advantages, of party connections. Early, too,
he obtained a post in the Civil Service (a Commissionership of Audit),
which gave him a comfortable subsistence while leaving him plenty of
leisure. For thirty years, between 1818 and 1848, he produced a series
of books on political and literary history which at once attained a very
high reputation, and can hardly be said to have yet lost it. These were
a _View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages_, published in the
first, and supplemented by a volume of notes and corrections in the
last, of the years just mentioned; a _Constitutional History of England_
from Henry VII. to George II. (1827); and an _Introduction to the
Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth
Centuries_ (1837-39).

The value of Hallam as a political and as a literary historian is by no
means the same. In the former capacity he was perhaps too much
influenced by that artificial and rather curious ideal of politics which
distinguished the Whig party of the later eighteenth century, which was
exaggerated, celebrated brilliantly, and perhaps buried by his pupil and
younger contemporary, Macaulay, and which practically erects the result
of a coincidence of accidents in English history into a permanent and
rationally defensible form of government, comparable with and preferable
to the earlier and unchanging forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and
democracy with their sub-varieties. A certain coldness and sluggishness
of temperament and sympathy also marred this part of Hallam's work,
though less mischievously than elsewhere. But to balance these drawbacks
handsomely in his favour, he possessed an industry which, immense as
have been the pains spent on his subjects since he wrote, leaves him in
possession of a very fair part of the field as a still trustworthy
authority; a mind, on the whole, judicial and fair; and an excellently
clear and scholarly if not exactly brilliant or engaging style.

As a literary historian and critic Hallam deserves, except on the score
of industry