The wonderful work which has here been imperfectly described was
accomplished under a shadow. Maitland, who was never really a strong
man, was, even before his marriage, not without warnings that he was
overtaxing his physical resources. When he delivered his inaugural
lecture he was already conscious that his days might be few. "I see
again," writes one who was present, "the dim room, the grey light and
the shadowy but inspired fragileness of the lecturer who was then
fighting a very serious illness.... It was no ordinary lecture, rather
a sort of sermon, grave and beautiful with its solemn call to work,
even though that work might lie in humble and obscure fields. And the
impression that was perhaps most immediately insistent, seeming to
underlie each word and sentence, was that the speaker felt the hours
of his own work to be already numbered and but few." In 1889, the year
after his election to the Downing Chair, a doctor pronounced over him
a sentence from which there is generally no successful appeal. "I very
much want to see you again," he wrote to a friend, March 12, 1889,
"and I don't know that I can wait for another year; this I say rather
seriously and _only to you_; many things are telling me that I have not
got unlimited time at my command and I have to take things very easily."
Devoted nursing, great care in diet, and a resolute avoidance of many
of the pleasant things of life enabled the work to proceed as buoyantly
as ever. There were bouts of illness and pain, when the French novelist
and especially the beloved and well-known Balzac had to be invoked,
but there were also periods of revival and at one time an assurance
that the alarming symptoms had disappeared. But in truth the malady
was never dislodged. "Slowly it is doing for me; but quite slowly,"
he wrote to a friend in 1899, "and it may cheer you to know that I
have had ten happy and busy years under the ban." In the summer and
autumn of that tenth year there was a sudden change for the worse and
it became clear that Maitland could no longer winter in England. "If I
have to sing a Nunc Dimittis," he wrote to Mr R. L. Poole, "it will run
'Quia oculi mei viderunt originalem Actum de Uniformitate primi anni
Reg. Eliz.' Few can say as much.... I think of a voyage to S. America
as S. Africa looks too warm for a man of peace."
From 1898 the Maitlands were compelled to fly south with the approach
of winter. Their regular resort was Grand Canary but once, in 1904,
this was exchanged for Madeira. Like all other habits idleness requires
cultivation and Maitland had never been idle. Under a tropical sky and
with an exquisite sense of relief from physical pain he worked his
writing muscles as busily as ever. In the first exile he translated
that part of Otto Gierke's _Deutsche Genossenschaftrecht_, which dealt
with medieval political theory, and published it with a brilliant
Introduction. Later he copied manuscripts of the Year Books lent to him
by the wise generosity of the Cambridge University Library and collated
or transcribed photographs of those manuscripts which it was impossible
to export. The last two winters were divided between the Year Books
and the composition of a biography of Leslie Stephen, and so far was
exile from being a holiday that the fruit of each winter spent in the
fortunate islands was never less than the substantial part of the
volume. Some letters shall speak of the impressions and activities of
these years.