Cambridge and the bar were familiar traditions. Samuel Maitland was a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, who, having been called to the bar, abandoned the professional pursuit of the law for historical research. He took orders, became Librarian at Lambeth, and ultimately retired to Gloucester to read and to write. John Gorham, seventh wrangler, third classic, Chancellor's medallist, crowned a brilliant undergraduate career by a Fellowship in his father's college and was then called to the bar, but finding little practice drifted away into the Civil Service, becoming first, examiner, and afterwards, in succession to his friend James Spedding, secretary to the Civil Service Commission, which last office he held till his death in 1863, at the age of forty-five. That he could write with point and vigour is made clear by a pamphlet upon the Property and Income Tax, published in 1853, but the work of the Civil Service Commission must have left little leisure for writing, and early death cut short the career of a man whose high gifts were as remarkable to his friends as was the modesty with which he veiled them from the world[1]. Frederic William, too, passed from Cambridge to the law and then away to work more congenial to his rare and original powers. Of direct parental influence Maitland can have known little. His mother died in 1851 when he was a baby, and twelve years afterwards, six months before a Brighton preparatory school was exchanged for Eton, he and his two sisters were left fatherless and the sole charge of the family devolved upon Miss Daniell the aunt, who stood in a mother's place. Dr Maitland, the historian, lived on till 1866 and his home in Gloucester, still called Maitland House, was from time to time enlivened by the visits of grandchildren. The fair landscape of Gloucestershire--the wooded slopes of the Cotswolds, the rich pastures of the Severn Valley with the silver thread of river widening into a broad band as it nears the Bristol Channel, the magical outline of the Malvern Hills, the blaze of the nocturnal forges in the Forest of Dean, were familiar to Maitland's boyhood. Gloucestershire was his county, well-known and well-loved. The beautiful old manor-house of Brookthorpe, one of those small grey-stone manor-houses which are the special pride of Gloucestershire, stood upon the lands which had come into the possession of the family through the marriage of Alexander Maitland with Caroline Busby in 1785. Round it in the parishes of Brookthorpe and Harescombe lay "Squire Maitland's" lands--a thriving cheese-making district until Canada began to filch away the favour of its Welsh customers.