Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 24.djvu/134

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

catalogue. From 1860 onward he spent several summer holidays at Penzance, and, liking the place and people, he made, between 1866 and 1888, important additions to the town library. His first present consisted of three hundred volumes of Restoration literature, and ultimately 1,764 books were received. They are kept in a compartment by themselves, and a separate catalogue was printed in 1880. The freedom of the borough of Penzance was offered him in 1884, and, but he was unable to visit the town, and it was never conferred. To the library of Edinburgh University he presented in 1872 a valuable Shakespearean library. The honorary degree of LL.D. was granted him by Edinburgh University in 1883.

Halliwell, as far as he could, avoided controversy. For a time he was deceived by J. P. Collier's forgeries respecting Shakespeare, but in 1853 he convinced himself of the truth, and in his ‘Observations on the Shakespearean Forgeries at Bridgwater House’ pointed out as considerately as possible the need of a careful scrutiny of all the documents which Collier had printed. From the first he expressed his suspicion of the Perkins folio, but assumed that Collier was himself the innocent victim of deception, and always chivalrously defended Collier's memory from the worst aspersions cast upon it. In 1880 Mr. Swinburne dedicated to Halliwell in admiring terms his ‘Study of Shakspere.’ Thereupon in 1881 Dr. Furnivall, director of the New Shakspere Society, who was engaged at the time in a warm controversy with Mr. Swinburne, severely attacked Halliwell in the notes to a facsimile reproduction of the Hamlet quarto of 1604. Halliwell sent letters of remonstrance to Robert Browning, the president of the New Shakspere Society, who declined to interfere, but Halliwell printed the correspondence, and some eminent members of the New Shakspere Society withdrew. A more distressing difference arose in 1884 between Halliwell and the corporation of Stratford-on-Avon. A committee was appointed to calendar certain documents with which he had failed to deal when arranging the archives in 1863, and he regarded this action as a reflection on himself. At the same time he offered to prepare autotypes of the more valuable Shakespearean documents at his own expense, but a dispute arose as to the authority which he claimed to exercise over the archives, and after charging the corporation with ingratitude and discourtesy he left the town for ever, and revoked the bequest of his collections to its corporation. He published six editions of a pamphlet giving his account of the quarrel. A case, presented by Halliwell to the Birthplace Museum in 1872 on condition that it should not be opened until his death, was unlocked on 14 Feb. 1889, and was found to contain 189 volumes of manuscript notes and correspondence, and pamphlets chiefly dealing with Halliwell's folio Shakespeare.

Under his will more than three hundred volumes of his literary correspondence, from which he ‘eliminated everything that could give pain and annoyance to any person,’ were left, with many books, manuscripts, and private papers, to the library of Edinburgh University. His electro-plates and wood-blocks he gave to the Shakspere Society of New York. His chief Shakespearean collections (originally destined for Stratford-on-Avon) were to be offered to the Birmingham corporation for 7,000l.; if this offer were not accepted they were to be sold undivided for 10,000l., and if no buyer came forward within twelve years the whole was to be sold by auction in a single lot. The Birmingham corporation declined the offer, and the collections were sold to Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., in 1897. The residue of the library was left, with trifling reservations, to Halliwell's nephew, Mr. E. E. Baker of Weston-super-Mare, who sold the chief portion in London in June 1889.

[Information from Halliwell's brother, the Rev. Thomas Halliwell of Brighton, and from friends; personal knowledge; Daily News, 4 Jan. 1889; Manchester Guardian, 5 Jan. 1889; Brighton Herald, 5 Jan. 1889; Athenæum, 12 Jan. 1889; Birmingham Daily Gazette, 14 Jan. 1889; Halliwelliana, a Bibliography of the Publications of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, by Justin Winsor (Cambridge, Mass., 1881); C. Roach Smith's Retrospections; Halliwell's privately printed Statements in Answer to Reports, 1845; his pamphlets respecting Dr. Furnivall's remarks (1881) and the quarrel with the Stratford corporation (1883–6), and the accounts (privately printed) of his own collections, especially that of 1887; Brit. Mus. Cat. Some early letters from Halliwell to Joseph Hunter and others are preserved in Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 24869 ff. 3–12, 28510 ff. 185–7, and 28670 ff. 4–6.]

S. L. L.

HALLORAN or O'HALLORAN, LAWRENCE HYNES (1766–1831), miscellaneous writer, ‘apparently a native of Ireland,’ was born in 1766. He became master of an academy at Alphington, near Exeter, where he had as pupil the future master of the rolls, Lord Gifford. Here he published ‘Odes, Poems, and Translations,’ 1790, and ‘Poems on Various Occasions,’ 1791. These include a variety of subjects, as ‘Ode on His Majesty's Birthday,’ ‘Animal Magnetism,’ ‘Anna,’ ‘Extempore Effusion to the Memory