chief Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, best known perhaps as one of the principal founders of the Society for Psychical Research, wrote a valuable book on _The Power of Sound_ and interested Maitland in the philosophy of their favourite art. "I walked once with E. Gurney in the Tyrol," Maitland wrote long afterwards, "What moods he had! On a good day it was a joy to hear him laugh!" Gurney died prematurely in 1888 and the increasing stress of work came more and more between Maitland and the concert room; but problems of sound continued to exercise a certain fascination over his mind and his last paper contributed to the Eranos Club at Cambridge on May 8, 1906, and entitled with characteristic directness "Do Birds Sing?" was a speculation as to the conditions under which articulate sound passes into music. That by the natural workings of his enthusiastic genius Maitland would have been drawn to history whatever might have been the outward circumstances of his career, is as certain as anything can be in the realm of psychological conjecture. Men of the ordinary fibre are confronted by alternatives which are all the more real and painful by reason of their essential indifference. This career is open to them or that career, and they can adapt themselves with equal comfort to either. But the man of genius follows his star. His life acquires a unity of purpose which stands out in contrast to the confused and blurred strivings of lesser men. Other things he might do, other tastes he might gratify; but there is one thing that he can do supremely well, one taste which becomes a passion, which swallows up all other impulses, and for which he is prepared to sacrifice money and health and the pleasures of society and many other things which are prized among men.