Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/827

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
HAL
785
HAL

believe, from the pen of the historian of Latin Christianity, the dean of St. Paul's, and we have been greatly indebted to it in the preparation of this memoir. Mr. Hallam married a daughter of Sir Abraham Elton; and of a numerous family, only two sons and two daughters survived the period of adolescence. The premature and sudden death of his eldest son has been already recorded. It was followed by that of Mr. Hallam's wife and eldest daughter. The remaining son, described as uniting much intelligence to a bare amiability and sweetness of disposition, was also carried off with great suddenness, and of the whole family, only a daughter now survives. "Bowed, but not broken by these sorrows, Mr. Hallam preserved his vigorous faculties to the last," says the author of the sketch from which we have already borrowed, "and closed his long and honoured life in calm christian peace" on the 22nd of January, 1859.—F. E.

* HALLÉ, Charles, the pianist, was born at Hagen in Westphalia, April 11, 1819. So early was the development of his musical talent, that in 1826 he gave concerts at Cassel, Göttingen, and other places, with great success. With prudent consideration for his subsequent progress, his father soon discontinued making public display of the boy's precocity, and he had nothing to distract him from the assiduous study of his art. He went to Darmstadt in 1834, where he became the pupil of Rinck and Godfried Weber for composition. He quitted that city in 1836, and went then to Paris, where he resided for twelve years. It was there that he laid the foundation of his artistic reputation; and his remarkable executive proficiency having long been acknowledged, he was the first who gave in the French capital a series of concerts of classical chamber music. In these he was associated with Alard the violinist, and Franehomme the violoncellist. They took place, by express permission of the government, at the Petite Salle du Conservatoire, in 1846; and their success was such as to establish a taste for this style of entertainment, which has induced their frequent imitation by other artistes. Halle paid a short visit to London in 1843, which he more than once repeated; but he came to England in 1848 to make this country his permanent abode. He was invited to Manchester by a number of gentlemen, who gave him a guarantee of engagements there as a teacher to a very large amount; he accepted their proposal, as also the appointment of conductor of the celebrated Gentlemen's Concerts, and was thus required to live chiefly at that city, where his active exertions have had a notable influence on the advance of music. His frequent choral and orchestral concerts, and his direction of the Italian and German opera for three months in 1854, established his fame as a conductor; while his annual course of chamber concerts held a far higher importance than any similar performances out of London. His constant visits to the metropolis, where he has played at all the principal concerts, have kept his great talent as a pianist before the public, with whom he is deservedly one of the most popular players on his instrument. This is a remarkable testimony to his merit, since, with unswerving fidelity to the highest artistic principles, he has never flattered the taste of the uneducated, but ever striven to exalt this to the noblest standard. In the autumn of 1860, Hallé was engaged as conductor of the first English opera ever established in Her Majesty's theatre, since when he has necessarily resided in London.—G. A. M.

HALLÉ, Jean Noel, an eminent French physician, born at Paris in 1754. He was appointed, in 1794, professor of medical physics at the School of Health. He afterwards became first physician to Napoleon, who, in 1804, appointed him to the chair of medicine in the College of France. At the restoration of the Bourbons, he was recalled to the court, and received into favour. He was the principal editor of the Codex medicamentarius Parisiensis, and contributed to the different learned societies a great variety of valuable papers on medical and scientific subjects. He died on the 3rd February, 1822.—G. BL.

HALLÉ, Pierre, born at Bayeux in 1611, was elected rector of the university of Caen in 1640, and in the following year was called to Paris, where he was appointed professor of rhetoric at the college of Harcourt, reader in the Latin and Greek languages at the royal college, and professor of canonical law. He died in 1689. He was the author of "Orationes et Poemata," and some dissertations on jurisprudence.—G. BL.

HALLECK, Fitz-Greene, an American poet of some distinction, was born at Guilford, Connecticut, in the August of 1795. At the age of eighteen he entered a counting-house in New York, where he continued many years. He was afterwards bookkeeper in the private office of John Jacob Astor the millionnaire, on whose death he retired to his native place. A verse writer from early years, he first acquired celebrity by the lively poems which, with his friend Drake, and under the signature of "Croaker & Co.," he contributed to the New York Evening Post in 1819, and which were chiefly local and satirical. Out of the success of the Croakers grew "Fanny," published anonymously in 1821, and in which the follies of American society were quizzed in the metre and tone of Byron's Don Juan. Mr. Fitz-Greene Halleck has also written several serious pieces. His collected poems have gone through several editions; one of the best and most recent was published at New York in 1858.—F. E.

HALLER, Albrecht von, M.D., one of the most learned and indefatigable men the world has ever seen, was born in 1708 at Berne in Switzerland. From his earliest years Albert von Haller showed that nature had indeed been a kind mother to him; for with little or no effort he outstripped all his contemporaries in the race of acquiring knowledge, having made himself master of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages between his sixth and ninth year. Even at this early age he had assumed the habit of writing down and carefully preserving every fact and piece of information which he held interesting; so that from Bayle's and Moreri's historical dictionaries, even before he had arrived at man's estate, he had the particulars of the lives of some two thousand eminent individuals noted in his commonplace books. Having chosen medicine as his profession, Haller went first to the university of Tübingen, and subsequently to Leyden for the prosecution of his studies. At Leyden he had the illustrious Boerhaave, and no less celebrated Albinus, among the number of his teachers; and these masters did not fail to discover the congenial soil they had to cultivate in their pupil. At Leyden Haller graduated in 1727, and in the course of the same year he visited France and England, making the acquaintance of many distinguished men of science during his travels. In the following year (1728) he went to Basle, and became the pupil of the celebrated Bernoulli, who had written learnedly on the mechanics of animal bodies, and under him became initiated into the mysteries of the higher mathematics. Having suffered in his health at this time from the long course of arduous study he had pursued, Haller now resolved on taking a holiday for a season, and in company with Jo. Gessner, a great lover of botanical studies, he traversed his native Alps, having his taste for botany aroused, and making a large collection of plants, which became the basis of one of his most successful works in after years—the "Enumeratio Stirpium Helvetiæ," 2 vols. fol. In this journey, too, the incidents were observed and the impressions made that by and by arranged themselves into the celebrated didactic poem "Die Alpen" (The Alps); for Haller had even as considerable a reputation in his lifetime for his poetical powers, as he had in his quality of anatomist and man of science. In 1729 Haller settled as physician in his native city of Berne; but though he appears to have met with some success, he lost his election as physician to the hospital there, principally on the ground that he was a poet. The professorship of oratory, for which he was a candidate subsequently, he also failed to obtain; by reason, it would seem, that at this time he was devoting all his energies to the study of anatomy, which probably did not appear the best preparation for the chair of eloquence. Haller in fact was one of those wonderful men to whom every species of human knowledge is accessible with little effort, and who by intuition, as it seems, possess all that ordinary mortals spend years in acquiring. No wonder then that the extent of his acquirements rather bewildered the unlettered natives of Berne, though they did at length show symptoms of appreciating their illustrious townsman by making him keeper of the communal library. The professor of anatomy at Basle, Meig, having fallen ill during Haller's residence there, Haller volunteered to deliver the lectures in his stead, and doing this his attention was of necessity particularly turned to the subject of anatomy and physiology, in which he was by and by to achieve so brilliant a reputation. During this time, too, as he could never be satisfied with having one set of irons only in the fire at once, he spent much time on a great didactic poem, entitled, "Thoughts on Reason, Superstition, and Unbelief." Whether this poem was ever completed, we have no information. In the whiter months, during his subsequent residence at Berne, Haller was in the habit of delivering a gratuitous course of lectures on anatomy; and these lectures became so