SOURCE: "Mount Maitland," in New Statesman, Vol. LXIX, No. 1786, June 4, 1965, pp. 882-83.

In the following essay, McFarlane reviews The Letters of Frederic William Maitland.

F. W. Maitland's posthumous reputation has run an oddly uneven course. When he died in 1906 his university received what was surely a letter with few if any precedents: an official address of condolence from the Chancellor and Masters of Oxford. Did her ancient sister perhaps feel that Cambridge, having already lost so much learning, wanted loyalty? Those seven lines of obituary in the Cambridge Review, when set beside the Oxford Magazine's two columns, were few enough to incite odious comparisons. The charitable theory that the depth of the silence equalled the depth of the shock is not borne out by the other evidence. Maitland had been much honoured when alive and yet The Times considered that a third of a column measured his deserts...