Page:Morley Roberts--The private life of Henry Maitland.djvu/19

Rh who loved him not, and I shall be much better pleased if what I do about him takes the shape of an impression rather than of anything like an ordinary biography. Every important and unimportant political fool who dies nowadays is buried under obituary notices and a mausoleum in two volumes — a mausoleum which is, as a rule, about as high a work of art as the angels on tombstones in an early Victorian cemetery. But Maitland, I think, deserves, if not a better, a more sympathetic tribute.

When I left Radford Grammar School my father, being in the Civil Service, was sent to Moorhampton as Surveyor of Taxes, and his family shortly followed him. I continued my own education at Moorhampton College, which was then beginning to earn a high reputation as an educational centre. Some months before I met Maitland personally I knew his reputation was that of an extraordinary young scholar. Even as a boy of sixteen he swept everything before him. There was nobody in the place who could touch him at classical learning, and everybody prophesied the very greatest future for the boy. I met him first in a little hotel not very far from the College where some of us young fellows used to go between the intervals of lectures to play a game of billiards. I remember quite well seeing him sit on a little