Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 35.djvu/377

  stated, but probably amounted to 130, including four officers, killed, and near a hundred wounded on the part of the land forces, while ‘the marine’ lost about 150. Maitland evinced throughout the best qualities of a commander. His report of the operations, although candid and unassuming, is not particularly lucid.

Maitland remained at Surat to repair the defences till April, when he landed at Bombay under a salute of thirteen guns. He received the thanks of the East India Company, to whom the acquisition of Surat brought an increase of revenue of about 50,000l. per annum. He was promoted to the rank of major on 10 March 1762, and died at Bombay on 21 Feb. 1763. He was buried the same day. It seems clear that Maitland's company is now No. 5 field battery.



MAITLAND, SAMUEL ROFFEY (1792–1866), historian and miscellaneous writer, was born in London at King's Road (now Theobald's Road), Bedford Row, on 7 Jan. 1792. His father, who was of Scottish extraction, was Alexander Maitland, a London merchant; his mother was Caroline Busby, a descendant of the famous head-master of Westminster School. She brought her husband an estate in Gloucestershire, which still remains in the possession of the family. The elder Maitland's presbyterian proclivities led him to attach himself to the congregationalist body in London, and it was very slowly that his only son, Samuel, broke away from his connection with the nonconformists. He was unfortunate in his early training, and was sent to various private schools, where he learnt a little Latin and less Greek, picked up some smattering of chemistry and French, but, as he says in an autobiographical fragment, ‘When I left school … I had no decent knowledge of any kind of history whatever.’ He left school in 1807, and was then placed under the tuition of the Rev. Launcelot Sharpe, one of the masters in Merchant Taylors' School, and a man of great learning and wide culture. Sharpe was a vehement supporter of the genuineness of the Rowley poems. From him, Maitland received his first acquaintance with the writings of Chatterton, and derived the conviction, which never left him, that there was more in the story of the Rowley poems than had yet been made known to the world. Under Sharpe, young Maitland, for the first time in his life, was brought into intimate relations with a scholar and man of real learning, who imparted to his pupil some of his own enthusiasm. From this time he became a diligent student, reading everything that came in his way. On 7 Oct. 1809 Maitland was admitted at St. John's College, Cambridge, and about the same time he entered at the Inner Temple with the intention of going to the bar. At St. John's he made no mark, and next year he migrated to Trinity College—induced to take this step by his desire to be nearer to his friend W. H. Mill [q. v.], afterwards Christian advocate, and regius professor of Hebrew in the university. It was from Mill that he caught his taste for Hebrew and Arabic literature. He left Cambridge in 1811, foreseeing that he could not get his degree without signing the Thirty-nine Articles and declaring himself ex animo a conscientious member of the church of England. As he afterwards declared, he could honestly have signed the articles, but he was not prepared to call himself a churchman when he was in communion with a dissenting body. In 1812 Dr. [q. v.] died, leaving Maitland's father and uncle his executors. Among other things, the doctor had left a large miscellaneous library behind him, and this young Maitland undertook to catalogue, on condition of receiving the duplicates as his reward—this was his first introduction to the work of librarian. From 1811 to 1815 he was living with his father, reading omnivorously, though in the main preparing for the bar. When he applied to be called, he found there were serious difficulties in the way, as he had not kept his terms at Cambridge. Accordingly, on 10 Oct. 1815, he once more returned to the university, entering again at St. John's. He kept three more terms, and at this time made the acquaintance of [q. v.], the self-taught orientalist, who had recently been made professor of Arabic. During the first half of 1816 he was occupying chambers in the Temple, and studying unceasingly, his only diversion apparently being music, which he studied as a science, while he practised it vigorously as an art, having a good command of two or three instruments. On 19 Nov. 1816 he married. He had been called to the bar in Easter term, 1816, but his literary tastes had got an increasing hold of him, and his studious habits were evidently not favourable to any hopes of professional success. In 1817 he published