SOURCE: "F. W. Maitland: 1850-1950," in The Cambridge Journal, Vol. 4, October, 1950-September, 1951, pp. 134-43.

In the following essay, White offers an appraisal of Maitland's work on the centenary of his birth.

It is strange to think that Maitland should have joined the centenarians. His genius has always seemed to lie in just those qualities of mind and spirit that should protect a man from the centenary-mongers, Wisden-watchers, and monumental masons of the memory. Yet, so it is. Maitland was born a century ago, and the word has gone round, and the plums of Fisher's little Life of 1910 have been pulled out and offered to us as substitutes for thinking about Maitland in 1950. Bletchley Junction threatens to become a terminus.

The perspective is still too short for anything like a final appraisal of the man and his work, but something more might already be attempted than the recitation of...