During the Middle Ages By Henry Hallam With a Critical and Biographical Introduction HALLAM'S "MIDDLE AGES" I N 1818 the press of John Murray, in London, gave to the world, in two quarto volumes, Henry Hallam's "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages." This was its author's earliest book; but its author was no unknown man. Born in 1777, of that old Lincolnshire family which in the fifteenth century gave to the see of Salisbury the prelate who stood so manfully for reform at Pisa and at Constance, Henry Hallam was already in ripe manhood, and the eyes of the leaders of thought had long been upon him. His father, Dr. John Hallam, Canon of Windsor and Dean of Bristol, a man distinguished both by learning and by character, and possessed of ample fortune, had given his only son the best education England could offer. To his mother he owed a strain of westcountry blood and a rare refinement and delicacy of soul; and it must have meant much to the beginnings of young Hallam's career that her brother, Dr. Roberts, a clerical verse writer of some repute and a lover of society, was Provost of Eton at the boy's advent there in 1790. The lad showed at school the same precocity which at home had made him a devourer of books at four and a sonnet writer at ten. He led his fellows in the class-room, and his Latin verse won a place in the Musæ Etonenses. At Oxford, to which he passed in 1794, his talent was not less marked. Here, a student at Christ Church, he gave especial thought to history. In 1799, taking his degree, he entered on his studies for the bar. These completed, he was for a few years a practising advocate in the Oxford circuit. But not his singular love of jurisprudence, nor that judicial insight and temper which seemed to insure him a lofty place upon the 1408 427 15. |