Among his favorite authors, while at the University, we have been told he greatly delighted in the old dramatists, Webster, Heywood, and Fletcher.  The grace and harmony of style and versification which he found particularly in the latter master became one of his favorite themes, and he often dwelt upon this excellence.  He loved to repeat the sad old strains of Bion; and Aeschylus and Sophocles interested him deeply.

On leaving Cambridge, he took his degree and went immediately to London to reside with his father.  It was a beautiful relation which always existed between the elder and the younger scholar; and now, as soon as Arthur had been entered on the boards of the Inner Temple, the father and son sat down to read law together.  Legal studies occupied the young student till the month of October, 1832, when he became an inmate of the office of an eminent conveyancer in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  Although he applied himself diligently to obtain a sound practical knowledge of the profession he had chosen, his former habits of literary pursuit did not entirely desert him.  During the winter he translated most of the sonnets in the “Vita Nuova,” and composed a dramatic sketch with Raffaello for the hero.  About this period he wrote brief, but excellent, memoirs of Petrarch, Voltaire, and Burke, for the “Gallery of Portraits,” then publishing by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.  But his time, when unoccupied at the office, was principally devoted to metaphysical research and the history of philosophical opinion.  His spirits, sometimes apt to be graver than is the wont of youth, now became more animated and even gay, so that his family were cheered on to hope that his health was firmly gaining ground.  The unpleasant symptoms which manifested themselves in his earlier years had almost entirely disappeared, when an attack of intermittent fever in the spring of 1833 gave the fatal blow to his constitution.  In August, the careful, tender father took his beloved son into Germany, trusting to a change of climate for restoration.  Travelling slowly, they lingered among the scenes connected with a literature and a history both were so familiar with, and many pleasant and profitable hours of delightful converse gladdened Arthur’s journey.  It is difficult to picture a more interesting group of travellers through the picturesque regions they were again exploring.

No child was ever more ardently loved—­nay, worshipped—­by his father than Arthur Hallam.  The parallel, perhaps, exists in Edmund Burke’s fond attachment for and subsequent calamity in the loss of his son Richard.  That passage in the life of the great statesman is one of the most affecting in all biographical literature.  “The son thus deeply lamented,” says Prior, “had always conducted himself with much filial duty and affection.  Their confidence on all subjects was even more unreserved than commonly prevails between father and son, and their esteem for each other higher....  The son looked to the father as one of the first, if not the very first, character in history; the father had formed the very highest opinion of the talents of the son, and among his friends rated them superior to his own.”  The same confiding companionship grew up between Henry Hallam and his eldest boy, and continued till “death set the seal of eternity” upon the young and gifted Arthur.