The scholarship at Trinity, carrying with it a place at the scholar's table, brought Maitland into communion with the ablest men in the College. It often happens that a youth who has attracted little attention at school by reason of his failure to satisfy the limited conventions of schoolboy excellence, springs into sudden prominence at the University. His conversation attracts notice; his friends discover that he has original opinions, or some peculiar charm of bearing, or that his gifts of mind or character are out of the common. So it was with Maitland. He soon achieved a reputation not only as a witty and brilliant talker, but as a charming companion and as the most original public speaker of his time. He was elected to be a member of the Apostles, a small society which for many university generations has been a bond between clever young Cambridge men and has brought them into friendly relations with their seniors: and by the suffrages of a larger and less select electorate he rose to be Secretary and then President of the Union Society. Maitland's speeches at the Union printed themselves upon the minds of his audience as being very effective for their immediate purpose and yet quite unlike the speeches of ordinary vote-winners. His artifice was all his own. Others were more eloquent, more prompt in the cut and thrust of debate, but in the power of condensing an argument into a surprising phrase or epigram he stood alone. After his first successful appearance as the advocate of the opening of National Collections of Science and Art on Sunday afternoons he became the favourite undergraduate orator of his time. "You insist that we must keep the Mosaic Law," he argued in his maiden speech, "but under it a man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath was stoned to death. Now I have picked up sticks on Sundays. Will you in your consistency stone me?" On another occasion he delighted the House by observing that at the Reformation the English State put an end to its Roman bride but married its deceased wife's sister. The shape of his opinions was frankly radical and fashioned by a vehement enthusiasm for free thinking and plain speaking. "There are two things," he remarked, "which we have learnt by costly experience that the Law cannot control--Religious Belief and the Rate of Interest." Compulsory attendance at College Chapel, Church Establishment, the closing of the Cambridge Union on Sunday mornings aroused his opposition and furnished the theme of well-remembered speeches. "O Sir," he once exclaimed to the President with outstretched hands, "I would I were a vested nuisance! Then I should be sure of being protected by the whole British Public."