Henry Hallam

Henry Hallam FRS FRSE FSA FRAS (9 July 1777 – 21 January 1859) was an English historian.

Called to the Bar, he practised for some years on the Oxford circuit; but his tastes were literary, and when, on his father's death in 1812, he inherited a small estate in Lincolnshire, he gave himself up to study.

He was, however, an active supporter of many popular movements—particularly of that which ended in the abolition of the slave trade; and he was attached to the political principles of the Whigs.

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, but this did not prevent him from being accused of bias.

The Quarterly Review for 1828 contains a hostile article on the Constitutional History,[7] written by Robert Southey, full of reproach: the work, he said, is the "production of a decided partisan".

[8] Hallam, like Thomas Babington Macaulay, ultimately referred political questions to the standard of Whig constitutionalism.

[9] The 4-volume Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1837–1839)[10][11][12] continues a topic broached in the View of the Middle Ages.

An author may be mentioned in many chapters: William Shakespeare, Hugo Grotius, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes appear in half a dozen different places.

It is an account of the books which would make a complete library of the period, arranged according to date of publication and subject.