A first attempt of its sort (it cannot be said here with too much frankness and conviction) can even less than any other book be faultless: and it is almost a sufficient proof of Hallam’s greatness that his faults are not greater. Some things, indeed, that seem to me faults may not even seem to be so at all to others. He was aware that he must “pass over or partially touch” some departments of at any rate so-called literature; but his preference or rejection may seem somewhat remarkable. Few will quarrel, at least from my point of view, with the very large space given to mere “scholars,” but it is surely strange that a historian should have thought History of secondary importance, while according ample space not only to Philosophy and Theology, but even to Anatomy and Mathematics. A more serious and a more indisputable blemish is the scanty and second-hand character of his account of mediæval literature, which he might almost as well have omitted altogether. It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that second-hand accounts of literature are absolutely devoid of any value whatever:—the best and latest authorities become equally “not evidence” with the stalest and worst. and defects. Hallam was aware of this principle to some extent, and he almost states it, though of course in his own more measured way, and with reference to quotation mainly, in his preface. But his first chapter is really nothing but a tissue of references to Herder and Eichhorn, Meiners and Fleury, with original remarks which do not console us. The account of Boethius at the very beginning is a pretty piece of rhetoric, but, as the Germans would say, not in the least “ingoing.” It is a horrible heresy to say[[559]] that “It is sufficient to look at any extracts” from the Dark Ages “to see the justice of this censure,” for no collection of extracts will justify the formation of any critical opinion whatsoever, though it may support, or at least illustrate, one formed from reading whole works.

In general distribution and treatment.

Further, in a note of Hallam’s[[560]] I think may be found the origin of Mr Arnold’s too exclusive preference for “the best and principal” things and his disparagement of the historic estimate, though I trust that Mr Arnold[[561]] would not have shared Hallam’s contempt, equally superfine and superficial, for the “barbarous Latin” of the Dark Ages. Finally, it is difficult to conceive a more inadequate reference to one of the most epoch-making of European poems (which is at the same time in its earlier part one of not the least charming) than the words “A very celebrated poem, the Roman de la Rose, had introduced an unfortunate taste for allegory in verse, from which France did not extricate herself for several generations.” It is all the worse because nothing in it is positively untrue.

It may be said to be unjust to dwell on what is avowedly a mere overture: but unluckily, when Hallam comes to his subject proper, all trace of second-hand treatment does not disappear. The part played by direct examination becomes very much larger; and the writer’s reading is a matter of just admiration, nor does he ever for one moment pretend to have read what he has not. But he has no scruple in supplementing his reading at second-hand, or even in doubling his own frequently excellent judgments with long quoted passages from writers like Bouterwek. Further, the surprise which has been hinted above as to his admissions and exclusions, and at his relative admissions in point of departments, may perhaps after a time change into a disappointed conviction that his first interest did not lie in literature, as literature, at all; but in politics ecclesiastical[ecclesiastical] and civil, juristics, moral and other philosophy, and the like. I am inclined to think that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Grotius have, between them, more space than is devoted to all Hallam’s figures in belles lettres from Rabelais to Dryden.

In some particular instances.

I could support this with a very large number of pièces if it were necessary; but a few must suffice, and in those few we shall find a further count against Hallam arising. Note, for instance, his indorsement of Meiners' complaint that Politian “did not scruple to take words from such writers as Apuleius and Tertullian,” an indorsement which in principle runs to the full folly of Ciceronianism, and with which it is well to couple and perpend the round assertion elsewhere that Italian is—even it would seem for Italians—an inferior literary instrument to Latin. Secondly, take the astounding suggestion that the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum “surely” have “not much intrinsic merit,” and the apparent dismissal of them as “a mass of vapid nonsense and bad grammar.” As if the very vapidity of the nonsense did not give the savour, and the badness of the grammar were not the charm! Here again another judgment (on the Satire Menippée) clinches the inference that Hallam’s taste for humour was small. If he is not uncomplimentary, he is strikingly inadequate, on Marot: and in regard to the Pléiade he simply follows the French to do evil, and as elsewhere puts himself under the guidance of—La Harpe! Few “heroic enthusiasts” will read his longer and more appreciative notice of Spenser without perceiving “some want, some coldness” in it; fewer will even expect not to find these privations in that of Donne. But the shortest of his shortcomings are reached in his article on Browne, and in part of that on Shakespeare. In the latter the famous sentence on the Sonnets is not, I think, so unforgivable as the slander on Juliet;[[562]] in the former one can simply quote in silence of comment. “His style is not flowing, but vigorous; his choice of words not elegant, and even approaching to barbarism in English phrase: yet there is an impressiveness, an air of reflection and serenity, in Browne’s writings which redeem many of his faults.”[[563]] The sentence that “Gondibert is better worth reading than The Purple Island, though it may have less of that which distinguishes a poet from another man”—in other words, that an unpoetical poem is better worth reading than a poetical one—is sufficiently tell-tale. It is not surprising, after it, that Hallam speaks respectfully of Rymer—a point where Macaulay, so often his disciple, fortunately left him.

His central weakness,