He was not without honour in his own generation. In that inclement December five invitations travelled out to Las Palmas,—from the University of Oxford that he should deliver the Romanes lecture, and from the United States of America that he should lecture at the Lowell Institute, at Harvard, and at the Universities of Columbia and Chicago. Academic honours had come to him in plenty. Cambridge and Oxford, Glasgow, Moscow and Cracow gave him their honorary degrees. He was corresponding member of the Royal Prussian and of the Royal Bavarian Academies, distinctions rarely conferred upon English scholars, an honorary Fellow of his old College, Trinity, an honorary Bencher of Lincoln's Inn, an original Fellow of the British Academy. The newly established bronze medal of the Harvard Law School was awarded to him in the last days of his life, and on the news of his death movements were set on foot at each of the great English Universities to do honour to his memory. At a public meeting held in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, on June 1, 1907, and addressed by some of the most eminent representatives of English learning it was resolved that "a Frederic William Maitland Memorial Fund should be established for the promotion of research and instruction in the history of law and legal language and institutions, and that this should be supplemented by a personal memorial to be placed in the Squire Library of the University[33]." At Oxford some students of law and history contributed to form a library of legal and social history to be called the Maitland Library, and to be connected with the Corpus Chair of Jurisprudence now held by Professor Vinogradoff. By the kindness of the Warden and Fellows of All Souls a room was lent to the Maitland Library in the front quadrangle of the College, and there the student may find Maitland's own copy of Domesday Book, together with many other volumes which had been in his possession and which bear the traces of his usage. As a token of his respect for Maitland's memory, and to further the skilled editing of a valuable repertory of knowledge, Mr Seebohm has presented to the Maitland Library his famous manuscript of the Denbigh Cartulary, one of the cardinal authorities for the history of Welsh land-tenures, and an edition of this collection of documents, executed by the pupils of the Corpus professor, will be the most appropriate tribute to Maitland's example in a University in which he might have been, but was not, an adopted son.

Lord Acton once spoke of "our three Cambridge historians, Maine, Lightfoot, Maitland," each a pioneer in his own region of research, and each a name of significance for universal history. Maitland was not a Conservative like Maine, or a Churchman like Lightfoot; he was simply a scientific historian, with a singularly open and candid mind, and with a detachment almost unique from the prejudice of sect or party. In politics he would have ranked himself as a Liberal Unionist, though his mind was far too independent to bear the strain of party allegiance and led him to differ upon some important questions from the principles upheld by the Unionist government. Thus he was in favour of what is called "the secular solution" in education, and tried, but without success, to think well of the policy which brought about the South African War. The Protectionist reaction excited his disapproval, and he joined a Free Trade Committee in Cambridge: but he rarely spoke of politics, and like all men of the scientific temperament had small interest in the party game, and no little diffidence as to his power of reaching solid conclusions upon questions which he had not the leisure thoroughly to explore. But upon matters which affected the interests of knowledge and education his views were firm and clear-cut.

His place in the history of English law has been summarized by Professor Dicey with an authority to which I can make no pretence. "Maitland's services to law were at least threefold. He demonstrated in the first place what many lawyers must have suspected, that law could contribute at least as much to history as history could contribute to law. Now that the truth of this assertion has been proved it seems a commonplace to insist upon it. But if one looks at the works of our best historians, even of so great an historian as Macaulay, who had rare legal capacity, and who had extensive knowledge from some points of view of English law, one is astonished to observe how small a part law was made to play in the development of the English nation, which had been, above all, a legal-minded nation. The doctrine that law was an essential part of history needed not only asserting—we could all probably have done this—but demonstrating. The needed demonstration has been made by Maitland, and will not be forgotten. Maitland's second achievement is this: law ought to be, but hitherto in England has not been, a part of the literature of England. Among Maitland's predecessors two men living in different ages have done their best to make law a part of the literature of England. You will forgive me for commemorating, as in my case is almost a matter of private duty, the noble effort made by Blackstone to give law its rightful position in the world of letters. Blackstone failed, not by any weakness of his own, but because he left no successors. He did as much as a man could achieve in Blackstone's time. Maitland himself, I believe, shared this opinion. The next man who took in hand a book somewhat similar to that undertaken by Blackstone was Sir Henry Maine. He achieved a great measure of success. He stimulated in a way which it was difficult for anyone to realise who had not read Maine's Ancient Law when it first appeared, public interest in law and jurisprudence. He gave to the English world a new view of the possibilities of interest possessed by the study of law. But his success is not complete. He did not show, as did Maitland, that even the most crabbed details of English law might be made part of English literature. The reason why Maine cannot in this matter stand on the same level with Maitland is that he did not possess the qualifications for the third and last of Maitland's great achievements. No one can say that profound learning was possessed by either Blackstone or Sir Henry Maine. But Maitland was a learned historian as well as a learned lawyer. He therefore could and did demonstrate that extraordinary learning and research have no connection whatever with dullness and pedantry, and that learning may be combined with the most philosophic and the profoundest views of law which the mind of man can form[34]."

This sketch will have been written in vain if it fails to suggest that the world lost in Maitland not only a great and original scholar but also a nature of singular charm and beauty. The life of severe scholarship may, and perhaps often does, dry up the fountains of sympathy, but this was not the case with Maitland. The current of his affections ran deep and strong, and so easily was his enthusiasm fired that he would praise the books of young authors with a delight which seemed almost unqualified if they happened to contain any real merit. No one was more entirely free from self-importance or from any desire to defend, after they had become untenable, positions which he had once been inclined to maintain. He possessed a gift which is far rarer than it is generally supposed to be, and is often very imperfectly possessed by learned men, an intense and disinterested passion for truth, a passion so pure that he would speak with genuine enthusiasm of such criticisms of his own work as he judged to be well founded and to constitute a positive addition to knowledge. His modesty, both in speech and writing, was so extreme that it might have been put down to affectation; but it was an integral part of the temper which made him great in scholarship. He saw the vast hive of science and the infinite garden of things, and knew how little the most busy life could add to the store; and so, living always in the company of large projects and measuring himself by the highest standard of that which is obtainable in knowledge, he viewed his own acquisitions as a small thing—a fragment of light won from a shoreless ocean of darkness.

His peculiar genius lay in discovery. He thought for himself, wrote a pure nervous English of his own, and even in the ordinary converse of life gave the impression of a being to whom everything was fresh and alive. His style was very characteristic of his vivid and elastic mind, ranging as it did from grave eloquence to colloquial fun, and using only the simplest vocabulary to produce its effects. Conscious theory or method of style he neither claimed nor cared to possess; he wrote as the spirit moved him, finding with astonishing ease the vestment most appropriate to his thought, and composing with such fluency that his manuscript went to press almost free of erasures. The literary and artistic conventions of the hour did not appeal to him. He never went to picture galleries; in later life he seldom read poetry, though as a boy he had been fond of it; and he would profess to be unable to distinguish a good sonnet when he saw one. Knowing the thing which he could do best, and judging that it was worthy of a life, he stripped himself of all superfluous tastes and inclinations that his whole time and strength might be dedicated to the work. Even music had to give way. And yet, though he laboured under the spur of a most exacting conscience and with every discouragement which illness and harrowing physical pain could oppose, it was with a certain blithe alacrity, as if work, however protracted and monotonous, was always a delightful pastime. He would sit in an armchair with a pipe in his mouth and some ponderous folio propped against his knees, steadily reading and smoking far into the night, thinking closely, taking no note, but apparently retaining everything. For a man who wrote and taught so much his knowledge was amazing both in range and accuracy; but his panoply might have been of gossamer so lightly did he bear it, and those who saw him a few times only may remember him chiefly for his irrepressible gift of humour, or for some external features, the fine steady brown eye, the rich flexible voice, the pale clear cut face seamed with innumerable lines, which lit up so quickly in the play of talk. Mr S. H. Butcher, who was in the same year at Cambridge and of the same college, has spoken the mind of those who knew him best. "When they think of him they recall, in the first instance, the delightful companion, the friend who had himself the genius of friendship. They think of his humour, overflowing from his talk and his speeches into what seems to many the driest regions of legal or antiquarian learning, and they recall his modesty, his quiet charm and his essential courtesy of soul[35]." And there was withal that high spiritual power of abnegation and of purpose in which the lover of hard won truth attains to his beatitude. Res severa est verum gaudium.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] A bronze bust, executed by Mr S. Nicholson Babb, has, in pursuance of this resolution, been presented to the University by the subscribers to the fund and is placed in the Squire Law Library.

[34] Cambridge University Reporter, July 22, 1907, p. 1308.

[35] Cambridge University Reporter, July 22, 1907, p. 1306.