half-personal

Updated: May 26, 2025

Hallam, the son of a Dean of Bristol, educated at Eton and Christ Church, an early Edinburgh reviewer, and an honoured pundit and champion of the Whig party, possessing also great literary tastes, much industry, and considerable faculty both of judging and writing, united almost all the qualifications for a high reputation; while his abstinence from public affairs, and from participation in the violent half-personal, half-political squabbles which were common among the literary men of his day, freed him from most of the disadvantages, while retaining for him all the advantages, of party connections.

George Saintsbury - A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)