In 1829, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Tennyson. Both joined a group known as the Cambridge Apostles. Their shared interests led to a close friendship, and Arthur became engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia Tennyson. While travelling abroad with his father, he died suddenly at Vienna, of a brain haemorrhage.
Hallam is the "A. H. H." of the dedication of In Memoriam and Tennyson not only dedicated one of his greatest poems to Hallam, but named his elder son after his late friend.
If Hallam ever deviated from perfect fairness, it was in the tacit assumption that the 19th century theory of the constitution was the right theory in previous centuries, and that those who departed from it on one side or the other were in the wrong.
Hallam is generally described as a "philosophical historian." The description is justified not so much by any philosophical quality in his method as by the nature of his subject and his own temper.
Hallam is a philosopher to this extent that both in political and in literary history he fixed his attention on results rather than on persons.