Henry Hallam

Henry Hallam (1777–1859) was an English historian, the son of a canon of Windsor, who was educated at Eton and Oxford and trained as a barrister before a government sinecure and private means allowed him to devote his life to study. His View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, The Constitutional History of England from Henry VII to George II and the Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries made him the leading Whig historian of his generation, admired for balance and wide reading rather than style. He outlived his gifted son Arthur Henry Hallam, whose death inspired Tennyson's In Memoriam.