[1] "English Men of Letters Series."
[2] In these three books Mr. Stevenson's stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, collaborated.
[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
HISTORIANS.
After the appearance of the works of Hume and Robertson, History became, as we have heard Gibbon say, the most popular theme with the reading public. His own monumental work gave new impetus to historical study. Sharon Turner (1768-1847) devoted himself mainly to Anglo-Saxon researches. Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) distinguished himself by research into the institutions and events of England and of English history from the Conquest to the days of the Plantagenets. Dr. Lingard, a Catholic priest (1771-1851), produced a general history of the country up to 1688, which perhaps has not yet been superseded by any book of similar scope, and which is the more valuable as indicating the aspect of events in the eyes of a Catholic. Necessarily the works of these authors lack much information, contained in manuscripts not then accessible to them, but now opened to students by the better arrangement and cataloguing of State Papers. The historians of the end of the eighteenth and the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth century, were not so heavily laden with documents as historical writers of to-day, and they had leisure enough to assimilate their less ponderous materials and to arrange them with more of reflection and of art than is now common.
The historian who wears best is decidedly Henry Hallam (1777-1859). The son of a Canon of Windsor, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church. He entered the Middle Temple, but obtained a fairly lucrative post in the Civil Service, had property of his own, and devoted himself, in his leisure, to literary and historical study. His "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages" holds its ground, despite the absence of materials now made common coin by Stubbs, Maitland, and others. Considering the immensity of the ground which Hallam surveys, his accuracy is remarkable (for example he corrects, all in vain, an important if minute error of detail which still infests the latest works on Jeanne d'Arc), and, though he is compelled to be concise, we see in his pages, for instance on Charlemagne, that he can combine spirit and interest with brevity. The same praise must be given to his "Constitutional History of England" (Henry VII.—George II.). It is commonly said that an impartial historian cannot be interesting. On the other hand, Hallam's conscientious efforts to be impartial lend much interest to his books. He has no flights of impetuous rhetoric; he is the last man to let his imagination transfigure prosaic facts into glittering fancies. We see an honourable, learned, and sober-minded man, who sums up life like a judge and does not plead like an advocate. "Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else to look," says Macaulay in his review of Hallam's book, a review even unusually rich in the unmeasured invective of the more popular historian. If we think Hallam "dull," the dullness is in ourselves. Hallam has not the current delusion that the Protestant reformers, from 1550 to 1688, were friends of freedom of conscience.
His last important book "An Introduction to the Literature of Europe" (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) is very deficient in taste for the early works of les primitifs: "we cannot place the 'Iliad' on a level with the Jerusalem of Tasso," in some essential respects. On the other hand, Hallam speaks thus of Christopher North (Professor Wilson): "A living writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty waters," with more to the same effect. Spenser's stanza "is particularly inconvenient and languid in narration". Hallam has, in fact, very little space for inspiriting literary criticism, on account of the vast scope of his theme. He has to treat of Scioppius, his "Infamia Famiani," and of Ubbo Emmius, of Grævius and Spanheim, Camerarius and Grew. The encyclopædic nature of Hallam's task made it impossible for him to avoid aridity, and to mingle much pleasure with instruction. He is otherwise associated with poetry, as his son Arthur was the friend of Tennyson, and dying early, inspired the long elegy of "In Memoriam," and the beautiful lines on "The Valley of Cauteretz".