"Let it be that the Latin and French were not of a very high order, still we see at Westminster a cluster of men which deserves more attention than it receives from our unsympathetic, because legally uneducated, historians. No, the clergy were not the only learned men in England, the only cultivated men, the only men of ideas. Vigorous intellectual effort was to be found outside the monasteries and universities. These lawyers are worldly men, not men of the sterile caste; they marry and found families, some of which become as noble as any in the land; but they are in their way learned, cultivated men, linguists, logicians, tenacious disputants, true lovers of the nice case and the moot point. They are gregarious, clubable men, grouping themselves in hospices, which become schools of law, multiplying manuscripts, arguing, learning and teaching, the great mediators between life and logic, a reasoning, reasonable element in the English nation." Meanwhile health was failing and gaps were being made in the circle of his most intimate friends. Henry Sidgwick, the revered master of philosophy, went first, then Lord Acton, finally, in 1904, Leslie Stephen. Some words which Maitland spoke of Henry Sidgwick have already been quoted in this memoir; they are passionate in the intensity of their affection and regard. Acton was a friend of less ancient standing, who by his high character and vast learning had conquered Maitland's unreserved enthusiasm; the loss of Leslie Stephen was mourned as that of a near relative. Of these deaths one was a possible and the other an actual cause of some deviation from Maitland's appointed course of legal work. Upon the vacancy in the Cambridge Chair of Modern History which occurred in 1902, Maitland was invited by Mr Balfour to succeed Acton. The appointment would have been applauded throughout the historical world, but Maitland felt that his health was too precarious to admit of his undertaking the labours of a new Chair. Besides, there were the Year Books; there were the illusive and fascinating subtleties of the _persona ficta_. He would not lightly abandon the law. _Nolumus leges Angliæ mutare_, he wrote to a friend, with a slight variation on the classic words of those English barons who in the reign of Henry III. resisted the introduction of a foreign usage. The decision was doubtless wise, but the continuity of Maitland's legal work was not destined to remain unbroken. Leslie Stephen had expressed a wish that, if any appreciation of him were published, it should be done by Maitland. "He, as I always feel, understands me." Such a call could not be neglected, and so the Year Books were laid aside, or rather the pace was slackened, while Maitland laboured with loving and scrupulous diligence upon the _Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen_.