Hallam

member of two parliaments, but the real business of his life was the preparation of his History of Greece, which appeared in successive volumes from 1784 to 1810.

He was a great enemy of democratic forms of government, as his principal pleasure, as Byron says, "consisted in praising tyrants." Mitford died on the 8th of February 1827. Sharon Turner (1768-1847) was a London attorney, who published a History of England to the Norman Conquest in 1799, and later on a History of England in the Middle Ages. A more interesting figure was that of John Lingard (1771-1851), who was the son of a carpenter at Winchester. He was educated at the English College at Douai, and stayed there nine years, being trained for the Catholic priesthood. When the seminary of Crook Hall was formed in 1794, Lingard became one of its original members, and continued there until the community, in 1808, was merged in Ushaw. In 1811, having declined the presidency of Maynooth College, he withdrew to Hornby, near Lancaster, where he spent forty years, immersed in historical research. In 1825 he was secretly made Cardinal, a title which at that time could not be assumed in England. Lingard's great History of England appeared in eight volumes between 1819 and He died at Hornby, 17th July 1851. Sir William Francis Patrick Napier (1785-1860) was born at Celbridge, County Kildare, on the 17th of December 1785. He entered the army in 1800, and after seeing a great deal of active service, retired in 1819 and settled in London. His History of the Peninsular War was published in six volumes between 1828 and 1840. From 1842 to 1847 Napier lived in Guernsey, as LieutenantGovernor. He died at Clapham Park on the 10th of February 1860.

William Mitford

From a Drawing by H. Edridge

1830.

These names, however, merely lead us up to that of HENRY HALLAM, whose View of the Middle Ages, in 1818, announced to the world a brilliantly gifted writer on political history. His Constitutional History of England came nine years later. In his old age Hallam made a track through the previously pathless waste of general European literature. His gravity is supported by a vast basis of solid knowledge, his judgment is sane and balanced, and to his immediate contemporaries his style appeared remarkable

for "succinctness and perspicuous beauty."

But the modern writer is

not so well pleased with Hallam, who begins to be the Georgian type of the falsely impressive. His felicities are those which Macaulay emphasised and carried to a further precision; his faults are his own, and they are a want of intuitive sympathy with the subject under discussion, and a monotonous and barren pomp of delivery which never becomes easy or flexible. The far-famed "judgment," too, of Hallam is not as wide as we could wish. He is safe only in the discussion of recognised types, and the reader searches his critical pages in vain for signs of the recognition of an eccentric or abnormal talent. The most laudable tendency of the historians of this age, seen in Hallam, indeed, but even more plainly in secondary writers, such as P. F. Tytler, William Coxe, the memoirwriter, and James Mill, was towards the adoption of a scientific accuracy. It was the aim of these men to reject mere legend and rhetorical superstition, and to build, as one of them said, "the history of a country upon unquestionable muniments." In this way they pointed directly to that scientific school of history which has been one of the glories of the later years of the nineteenth century.

Henry Hallam

Henry Hallam (17771859) was the son of a Dean of Bristol, and was born at Windsor on the 9th of July 1777. He was entered at Eton in 1790, and remained there until he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, in April 1795. He took his degree there in 1799, and became a student at the Inner Temple; he was called to the bar in July 1802. Beyond these bare facts, however, little is recorded of Hallam's early life, except that he was identified with the Whigs of the Edinburgh Review. His political friends secured him from all anxiety by providing him with a commissionship of records, afterwards of stamps, a post which he held from 1806 to 1826. He married in 1807, and began to devote himself entirely to historical research. His first great production, A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, was published in 1818, and was the earliest comprehensive survey of

From an Engraving by Cousins of the Portrait by Thomas Phillips

VOL. IV.

M

The Novelist's

modern history which had been attempted. In 1827 Hallam produced his Constitutional History of England, bringing the subject down to the reign of George III. In spite of the impartiality of the author, this work was attacked in the Tory press as "the production of a decided partisan." Hallam turned from the thorny paths of political history to belles-lettres, and from 1837 to 1839 produced the four ample volumes of his Introduction to the Literature of Europe. Before this he had suffered the loss of his highly-gifted son, Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-1833), whose grace and promise are passionately celebrated by Tennyson in In Memoriam; the historian published his son's remains, with a short life, in 1834. In 1852 he made a selection of his own literary essays. Hallam bore repeated domestic sorrow with dignified resignation, and died, full of years and honours, at his house at Penshurst, on the 21st of January 1859.

FROM "A VIEW OF THE STATE OF EUROPE."

If we look at the feudal polity as a scheme of civil freedom, it bears a noble countenance. To the feudal law it is owing that the very names of right and privilege were not swept away, as in Asia, by the desolating hand of power. The tyranny which, on every favourable moment, was breaking through all barriers would have rioted without control if, when the people were poor and disunited, the nobility had not been brave and free. So far as the sphere of feudality extended, it diffused the spirit of liberty and the notions of private right. Every one will acknowledge this who considers the limitations of the services of vassalage, so cautiously marked in those law-books which are the record of customs; the reciprocity of obligation between the lord and his tenant; the consent required in every measure of a legislative or general nature; the security, above all, which every vassal found in the administration of justice by his peers, and evenwe may in this sense say-in the trial by combat. The bulk of the people, it is true, were degraded by servitude; but this had no connection with the feudal tenures.

The peace and good order of society were not promoted by this system. Though private wars did not originate in the feudal customs, it is impossible to doubt that they were perpetuated by so convenient an institution, which indeed owed its universal establishment to no other cause. And as predominant habits of warfare are totally irreconcilable with those of industry, not merely by the immediate works of destruction which render its efforts unavailing, but through that contempt of peaceful occupations which they produce, the feudal system must have been intrinsically adverse to the accumulation of wealth, and the improvement of those arts which mitigate the evils or abridge the labours of mankind.

The splendid achievements of Miss Austen in the novel and Sir Walter Scott in romance tended somewhat to the discouragement of their immediate successors. The Waverley Novels continued to be poured forth, in rapid and splendid succession, throughout the years which we are now considering, and they obscured the fame of all possible rivals. Yet there were, during this period, secondary writers, independent of the influence of Scott, whose novels possessed sterling merit. From that interesting Scottish author, MARY BRUNTON, whose Self-Control and Discipline are excellent precursors of a long series of "kail-yard" fiction, there naturally descended the delightful Miss SUSAN FERRIER, whose Marriage charmed not only the author of Waverley, but a host of lesser readers, by its lively humour and its delicious satire of many types of Scotch womanhood. Miss Ferrier would be a Doric Jane Austen were her skill in the evolution of a plot a

little better trained, and her delineation of character a little more sternly restrained from caricature. The story of her delicate tact in soothing the shattered faculties of Sir Walter Scott has endeared Miss Ferrier to thousands who never read her three amusing novels. Miss JANE PORTER reproduced Scott's historical effects in a kind of chromolithography, but not without some dashing merit of design. J. G. LOCKHART, though Scott's son-in-law, was not his disciple in four novels of a modern and more or less psychological class. Adam Blair is the best of these, and escapes the frigidity of the author's one classical romance, Valerius, a highly accomplished attempt to resuscitate domestic society under Trajan.

Susan Edmonston Ferrier (1782-1854) was the daughter of James Ferrier, factor to the Duke of Argyll, and was born in Edinburgh on the 7th of September 1782. Her father was afterwards

associated with Sir Walter Scott as one of the clerks of session, and she became acquainted with the great novelist at least as early as 1811. In the inception of her first. romance, Marriage, Miss Ferrier was helped by a Miss Clavering, but the actual writing was her own. This book was well received, and Sir Walter greeted the lady as "my sister shadow." After the marriage of her sisters and the death of her mother, Susan kept house for her father in Edinburgh until 1829. Her second novel, The Inheritance, appeared in 1824, and her third and last, Destiny, in 1831. During Sir Walter Scott's last illness Miss Ferrier was asked to come to Abbotsford to help to cheer him, and her aid was deeply appreciated, for, as Lockhart says, "she knew and loved him well, and she had seen enough of affliction akin to his to be well skilled in dealing with it." She left

very interesting notes of her twenty years' friendship with Scott. Miss Ferrier lived on until November 5, 1854, when she died in her house in Edinburgh. Mrs. Mary Brunton (1778-1818) was the daughter of Colonel Balfour of Elwick, and was born at Burrey, in Orkney, on the 1st of November 1778. She married Mr. Brunton, the minister of Bolton, East Lothian. Her first novel, Self-Control, was published in 1811; her second, Discipline, in 1814; her third, Emmeline, was left unfinished at the time of her death, December 7, 1818.

Jane Porter (1776-1850), to whom Sir Walter Scott told stories of witches and warlocks when she was a little girl, became the author of two excessively popular romances, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 1803, and The Scottish Chiefs, 1810, which gave her fame throughout the whole of Europe, and, in spite of their stilted artificiality, are not yet forgotten. She was one of the gifted children of an Irish officer, whose widow came to Scotland, and brought up her family in an atmosphere of romantic culture. Jane Porter died, unmarried, at Bristol, on the 24th of May 1850.

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was the son of the minister of Cambus. nethan in Lanarkshire, in the manse of which he was born on the 14th of July 1794. The family removed in his infancy to Glasgow, where he was educated, until in 1809 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a bachelor's degree in 1817. But in 1813 he had settled into the study of Scotch law at Edinburgh, being called to the bar in 1816. In 1818 his famous friendship with Sir Walter Scott began, and in 1820 he married Scott's daughter, Sophia, and settled at Chiefswood, near

Jane Porter

Abbotsford. Encouraged by his illustrious father-in-law, Lockhart now gave himself seriously to literature, publishing Valerius in 1821 and Adam Blair in 1822. In 1825 he was appointed editor of the Quarterly Review, and came to live in London. His famous Life of Sir Walier Scott appeared in seven volumes between 1836 and 1838. In late years Lockhart suffered many distressing bereavements, and his own health gave way. He resigned the editorship of the Quarterly, and withdrew to Italy, whence he returned to die at Abbotsford on the 25th of November 1854. He was buried, at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, in Dryburgh Abbey.

FROM THE "LIFE OF SIR
WALTER SCOTT."

As I was dressing on the morning of Monday the 17th of September, Nicholson awoke in a state of composure

came into my room, and told me that his master had and consciousness, and wished to see me immediately. I found him entirely himself, though in the last extreme of feebleness. His eye was clear and calm-every trace of the wild fire of delirium extinguished. "Lockhart," he said, "I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man-be virtuous-be religious-be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." He paused, and I said, "Shall I send for Sophia and Anne?" "No," said he, "don't disturb them. Poor souls! I know they were up all night-God bless you all." With this he sank into a very tranquil sleep, and, indeed, he scarcely afterwards gave any sign of consciousness, except for an instant on the arrival of his sons.

They, on learning that the scene was about to close, obtained a new lease of absence from their posts, and both reached Abbotsford on the 19th. About half-past one P.M. on the 21st of September, Sir Walter breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day-so warm, that every window was wide open-and so perfectly