The _Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen_ appeared in the autumn of 1906, and reviews were steadily flowing in when the Downing household began to make preparations for its annual pilgrimage across the sea. Maitland, who was greatly relieved at the publication of his book, and at its friendly reception in the press, seemed to have recovered something of his old buoyancy. He pushed on an edition of Sir Thomas Smith's _De Republica Anglorum_, which a pupil was undertaking at his instigation and under his supervision, and renewed his attack upon the Year Books. For some years past he had been concerned with the prospect of finding a trained scholar who would be capable of carrying on the work when he was no longer there to direct it. In a foreign university a man of Maitland's power would have created a school; young men from all parts of the country would have clustered round him to learn paleography and law French, and the elements of social and legal history, and the zeal of the class would have atoned for any deficiency in numbers. But the climate of the English University is not favourable to the production of finished historical technique. We are an economical race, and since advanced work does not pay in the Tripos, or in the careers to which the Tripos serves as a portal, it is left to the casual patronage of amateurs. Maitland thoroughly understood the practical limitations under which an English professor must work. He gave courses of lectures which were expressly adapted to the general needs of the undergraduates, and were attended by all the law students in the University, but interspersed these general courses with others of a more special character, designed to interest the real historical student. Thus, in 1892 and 1894, he held classes for the study of English Medieval Charters, and this instruction in paleography and diplomatic was repeated in 1903, 1904 and 1905. In sixty hours spent over facsimiles Maitland contended that he could turn out a man who would be able to read medieval documents with fluency and exactitude. But with two exceptions the contributors to the volumes of the Selden Society were not drawn from the ranks of Maitland's Cambridge pupils, and the completion of the fourth volume of the Year Books was undertaken by a distinguished scholar, who, though he would be the first to admit that he had learnt much of his craft from Maitland, was never an academical pupil in the strict sense of the term.