[PREFATORY NOTE]
Whatever merit this Memoir may possess it owes to Maitland and to the circle of those who cherish his memory. My own disabilities will be made plain to the reader, but, lest he entertain false expectations, let me explain at the outset that I was educated neither at Eton, nor at Cambridge, nor at Lincoln's Inn, that I am no lawyer, and that I have never received a formal education in the law. Finally, I did not make Maitland's acquaintance till he was in his thirty-seventh year. These are grave shortcomings, and if I do not rehearse the long roll of benefactors who have helped me to repair them, let it not be imputed to a failure in gratitude. I cannot, however, forbear from mentioning five names. Before these sheets went to Press they were read by Mrs Maitland, by Mrs Reynell, by Dr Henry Jackson, by Dr A. W. Verrall and by Professor Vinogradoff. To their intimate knowledge and weighty counsels I owe a deliverance from many errors. Dr Jackson has generously laid upon himself the additional burden of helping me to see the volume through the Press.
H. A. L. FISHER.
May 1910.
[I.]
The life of a great scholar may be filled with activity as intense and continuous as that demanded by any other calling, and yet is in the nature of things uneventful. Or rather it is a story which tells itself not in outward details of perils endured, places visited, appointments held, but in the revelation of the scholar's mind given in his work. Of such revelation there is no stint in the case of Frederic William Maitland. Within his brief span of life he crowded a mass of intellectual achievements which, if regard be had to its quality as well as to its volume, has hardly, if ever, been equalled in the history of English learning. And yet though a long array of volumes stands upon the Library shelves to give witness to Maitland's work, and not only to the work, but to the modest, brilliant and human spirit which shines through it all and makes it so different from the achievement of many learned men, some few words may be fitly said here as to his life and as to the place which he held and holds in our learning.
He was born on the 28th of May, 1850, at 53 Guilford Street, London, the only son of John Gorham Maitland and Emma Daniell. Father and mother both came of good intellectual lineage. John Gorham Maitland was the son of Samuel Roffey Maitland, the vigorous, learned and unconventional historian whose volume on the Dark Ages, published in 1844, dissipated a good deal of uncritical Protestant tradition. Emma Daniell was the daughter of John Frederic Daniell, a distinguished physicist, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-three, invented the hygrometer and published, as Professor of Chemistry at King's College, a well-known Introduction to Chemical Philosophy.