In the autumn of 1869 Maitland went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Commoner. The learned Samuel Roffey had been a musician both in theory and practice, and the taste for music descended through the son to the grandson. The first year of Maitland's undergraduate life was given over to music, mathematics and athletics; but his earliest distinctions were gained not in the most but in the least intellectual of these pursuits. Though he can never have looked otherwise than fragile, he had outgrown his early delicacy and become an active lad with considerable powers of endurance. He won the Freshman's mile in four minutes forty-seven seconds, excellent time as records went then, and obtained his "blue" as a three-miler in the Inter-University Sports. The two mile walking race, the quarter, and the mile, fell to him at various times in the Third Trinity Sports. Nor were his athletic activities confined to the running path. His friend Mr Cyprian Williams remembers his last appearance as a racing oarsman; how on the final day of the Lent races of 1872 the Third Trinity second boat after a successful week made a crowning bump, how in the moment of the victory the crew were tipped over into the cold and dirty waters of the Cam, and how in the evening the boat dined in Maitland's lodgings over Palmer's boot-shop and kept up its festivity well into the morning.