Frederick William Maitland, Downing Professor of the Laws of England: A Biographical Sketch — John Shaqi
Frederick William Maitland, Downing Professor of the Laws of England: A Biographical SketchFisher, H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
History
Frederick William Maitland, Downing Professor of the Laws of England: A Biographical Sketch
Fisher, H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
Maitland, Frederic William, 1850-1906
In the autumn of 1869 Maitland went up to Trinity College, Cambridge,
as a Commoner. The learned Samuel Roffey had been a musician both in
theory and practice, and the taste for music descended through the
son to the grandson. The first year of Maitland's undergraduate life
was given over to music, mathematics and athletics; but his earliest
distinctions were gained not in the most but in the least intellectual
of these pursuits. Though he can never have looked otherwise than
fragile, he had outgrown his early delicacy and become an active lad
with considerable powers of endurance. He won the Freshman's mile
in four minutes forty-seven seconds, excellent time as records went
then, and obtained his "blue" as a three-miler in the Inter-University
Sports. The two mile walking race, the quarter, and the mile, fell to
him at various times in the Third Trinity Sports. Nor were his athletic
activities confined to the running path. His friend Mr Cyprian Williams
remembers his last appearance as a racing oarsman; how on the final
day of the Lent races of 1872 the Third Trinity second boat after a
successful week made a crowning bump, how in the moment of the victory
the crew were tipped over into the cold and dirty waters of the Cam,
and how in the evening the boat dined in Maitland's lodgings over
Palmer's boot-shop and kept up its festivity well into the morning.
Long before this--at the beginning of his second year at
Cambridge--Maitland found his way into Henry Sidgwick's lecture-room
and made a discovery which shall be told in his own words. "It is
now thirty years ago that some chance--I think it was the idle whim
of an idle undergraduate--took me to Sidgwick's lecture-room, there
to find teaching the like of which had never come in my way before.
There is very much else to be said of Sidgwick; some part of it has
been beautifully said this afternoon; but I should like to add this:
I believe that he was a supremely great teacher. In the first place
I remember the admirable patience which could never be out-worn
by stupidity, and which nothing but pretentiousness could disturb.
Then there was the sympathetic and kindly endeavour to overcome our
shyness, to make us talk, and to make us think. Then there was that
marked dislike for any mere reproduction of his own opinions which
made it impossible for Sidgwick to be in the bad sense the founder
of a school. I sometimes think that the one and only prejudice that
Sidgwick had was a prejudice against his own results. All this was
far more impressive and far more inspiriting to us than any dogmatism
could have been. Then the freest and boldest thinking was set forth in
words which seemed to carry candour and sobriety and circumspection to
their furthest limit. It has been said already this afternoon, but I
will say it again: I believe that no more truthful man than Sidgwick
ever lived. I am speaking of a rare intellectual virtue. However
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