[In the essay that follows, Garnett provides a biographical sketch of Trelawny, and contends that he “quickly caught and reflected the spirit of his age” by cultivating a romantic role for himself.]

I.

The sources for a memoir of Trelawny are few. That the following sketch of his life and character—slight as it is—is the fullest yet published is due to the publication last year of a number of his letters in Mrs. Julian Marshall's Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Her Life and Letters. Other material is The Adventures of a Younger Son, the Recollections of Shelley and Byron, Obituaries, a pamphlet or two, reviews and anecdotes, and a few allusions to him by his contemporaries. For some particulars and anecdotes of his latter years, the writer desires to thank Miss Taylor of Sompting: to Mrs. Julian Marshall he is indebted for a sight of the advance sheets of her Life of Mary Shelley.

Edward John Trelawny was born in London on the second or third of November, 1792. A younger son, he was of good blood, his mother Maria Hawkins, sister of Sir Christopher Hawkins, marrying Charles Brereton Trelawny, of noble Cornish stock. For the first twenty years of Trelawny's life there is no authority but the Younger Son. How far the book is “history,” and how far romance, must therefore be considered. It is most likely from the internal evidence, that Trelawny began with the intention of writing his life, that as he progressed he found that a little fiction set off the facts to great advantage, and that, towards the end, the book becomes less and less of the life, and more and more of the romance. The Younger Son is an excellent stage hero by the finish; he meets and overcomes all odds; it is truly a glorious Trelawny, the Trelawny of his own imagination. But the account of his boyhood has a very real air, and if it is accepted, we see him as a self-willed, passionate boy, whose bad bringing-up developed his faults and hardened his character. At the age of twelve he went to sea on board the Superb, having the ill-fortune to miss the battle of Trafalgar through Admiral Duckworth delaying three days at Plymouth to get in mutton and potatoes. From his own account Trelawny would have us believe that he was then transferred to a sloop of war, and that as a midshipman on board her, he visited “the four quarters of the world,” the voyage lasting eighteen months. But there is a document now in the possession of his family which shows that he never held warrant or commission in the navy. If we take it that he joined a merchantman, and that at length, sick of discipline, he joined a privateer cruising in the Indian seas, we shall perhaps be near the truth. The account of his next three years is still more open to doubt. That he led an adventurous life after deserting his ship is evident from the force and fire with which he sets forth his adventures; that he coloured, rearranged, and intensified these adventures is equally self-evident. To make an exciting consecutive narrative Trelawny doubtless threw together his own experiences and the tales and descriptions of others. The result justified him: the Younger Son is artistic from first to last, and holds the reader throughout. That not merely the colouring, but also the outline of the narrative does not follow fact it is almost superfluous to point out. One instance may be quoted. Trelawny, writing to Mary Shelley, says, “In the chapter towards the conclusion wherein I narrate an account of a pestilence which was raging in the town of Batavia, I wish the words ‘Java fever’ to be erased and ‘cholera morbus’ substituted. For we alone had the former on board the schooner, having brought it into the Batavia roads with us. … It was in 1811 I am speaking of.” Now the Younger Son is made to sail for Europe some months before the taking of Port Bourbon by the English in December, 1810. It is therefore impossible to accept Trelawny's account of his life as described in the latter half of the Records; and indeed the dates he gives us are never reliable. Here and there indeed his experiences after 1820 seem to have suggested incidents for the years 1809 and 1810: he would probably not have shown himself burning Zela's body, had he not burned Shelley's in 1822.

In the Younger Son Trelawny states that he was married when he was twenty-one, and as this marriage took place in England he must have returned to Europe in the year, or before the year 1813. He mentions, as before shown, that he was at Batavia in 1811, but from this date up to 1820 he tells us nothing of himself. Perhaps, indeed, there is little to tell. The adventurer was domesticated,—“The fatal noose was cast around my neck … my shaggy mane trimmed, my hitherto untrammelled back bent with a weight I could neither endure nor shake off, my light and springy action changed into a painful amble—in short, I was married” (Adventures of a Younger Son, p. 116). It is not necessary to refer to Trelawny's domestic life here. It is sufficient to say that he was married thrice, and, probably through his own fault, his marriages cannot be called happy. Letters very likely exist showing what became of Trelawny between 1813 and 1820; a passage in the Recollections hints that some of these seven years saw him on his travels again; anyway, he turns up at the latter date, according to the Recollections at Ouchy. He returned to England the same year, but in January, 1822, carried out his intention of visiting Shelley and Byron abroad. His reception, the friendship he formed for both poets, and his movements up to Shelley's death in July, 1822, are fully set forth in the Recollections. In the latter end of the same year he started on a wild-fowling expedition in the Maremma, is heard of from Piombino in January, 1823, and three months later reaches Rome, where, in the new Protestant burying-ground, he re-interred the ashes of Shelley. Trelawny shortly afterwards joined Byron at Albaro, and sailed with him to Greece in the Hercules, the object of the visit being to meet Blaquiere, and, if possible, aid the cause of Greece against the Turks. No definite plan of action was formed, and shortly after their arrival at Cephalonia Trelawny parted from Byron and attached himself to Odysseus, a Greek chieftain, whom he assisted in ambuscades, onslaughts, rock-fighting, forays, and intrigues. Their hope of getting Byron to Salona, and thence to Athens, and their plan of holding the Acropolis, were frustrated by the latter's death on April 29, 1824. After some months of fruitless intrigue, Odysseus entrusted the defence of his stronghold in Mount Parnassus to Trelawny towards the close of 1824. The result of Odysseus's plottings is history: he was at last captured and carried off to Athens, where he was strangled by order of Mavrocordato, the Director-General of Western Greece, and Trelawny, who had married the chieftain's youngest sister, Tersitza, was shot in the stronghold by a Scotch spy named Fenton, and his dupe, a weak-headed young Englishman, Whitcombe. Trelawny, after much suffering from his wounds, seized an opportunity of escaping from the cavern, and landed at Cephalonia in September, 1825. The letter to John Hunt, Leigh Hunt's brother, a facsimile of which is given in the present volume, describes the taking of Missolonghi by the Turks in 1826.

In December, 1826, we find him writing to Mrs. Shelley from Zante: “A bountiful will and confined means are a curse, and often have I execrated my fortunes so ill correspond with my wishes. … Old age and poverty is a frightful prospect … it is the climax of human ill. You may be certain I could not write thus on what I did not feel.” In the autumn of 1828 he paid a visit to England, but returned to the Continent in the spring of the following year, feeling out of his element at home, as this characteristic outburst shows: “To whom am I a neighbour, and near whom? I dwell amongst tame and civilized human beings, with somewhat the same feelings as we may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wilderness, he is tortured into domestic intercourse with what Shakespeare calls ‘forked animals,' the most abhorrent to his nature.” Abroad, Trelawny seems to have mixed in as good society as at home: in his letters he mentions Walter Savage Landor, Kirkup the artist, the Barings, and Charles Brown, the friend of Keats. In October, 1830, Trelawny despatched to Mrs. Shelley the MS. of his “history,” published a year afterwards under the title of Adventures of a Younger Son. Several passages were omitted, as Colburn, the publisher, and Mrs. Shelley, insisted that their license, or, as they termed it, coarseness, would give offence to readers. The following extracts from his letters show how he professed to regard the work: March, 1829.—“I am actually writing my own life. Brown and Landor are spurring me on, and are to review it sheet by sheet.” August, 1830.—“I have nearly completed the first volume of my history. … At present I wish the first series to go forth strictly anonymously, and therefore you must on no account trust the publisher with my name.” October, 1830.—“Surely there is matter enough in the book to make it interesting, if only viewed in the light of a romance.” January, 1831.—“It has been a painful and arduous undertaking narrating my life. I have omitted a great deal, and avoided being a pander to the public taste for the sake of novelty or effect. … My life is not a novel.”

The book was published anonymously, Trelawny, with his usual mystery of manner, assuring his correspondent that “if my name is known, and the work can be brought home to me, the consequences will be most disastrous.” As Mrs. Shelley was able, three months afterwards, to inform him that his mother was speaking openly in society of his forthcoming memoirs, it must be supposed that he took precautions in time to save himself from these “most disastrous consequences”—the consequences of being convicted of romancing. However much Trelawny may have wished to put his name to his tissue of fact and fiction, he foresaw that such a step would do no good to it, and would give his adversaries an opportunity of attacking his character and veracity. The book naturally rather puzzled the critics, The Literary Gazette remarking, “It is just the wild and reckless journal we could suppose kept by some bold buccaneer,” while to The Athenaeum it appeared that “the author, in imagining a fictitious autobiography (for we now perceive it can be nothing else) has been misled by sheer ignorance and lack of taste.” The same critical journal was very naturally shocked by the “extreme grossness of the language,” considered the hero as “a kind of ruffian from his birth,” whose “errors and crimes” were “those of a savage,” and, in sorrowful remonstrance, asked its readers “What is the utility of drawing a character in which there is not a single redeeming point?” It is very justly held a reviewer's duty, first, to establish his own superiority over the author he is criticizing, and secondly, to respect the prejudices of the readers of his review, and the extracts quoted above show that the anonymous critic was fully alive to what was expected of him. It is, however, only fair to him to allow that there was no well-known name to vouch for the book, that there was, in fact, nothing but the text to prove that it was a work of rare brilliancy, if not of genius. Its passages of bloodshed may offend the squeamish, but then it was no more written for old ladies than for The Athenaeum reviewer, to whom its freshness and vigour seemed such sad lack of taste. Its chief fault is inaccuracy in details. Trelawny himself said that it was principally adapted to sailors, but we imagine that seamen could pick holes in the seamanship he displays. Its peculiar merits were perhaps not pleasing to critics of the greatest delicacy and refinement, as it is both unconventional and original. It is real, and yet a romance. How real may be seen by comparing a book of fictitious adventures with it. Let any be chosen, “Treasure Island,” for example, and admirable as is Mr. Stevenson's piece of work, its characters, its encounters seem pale and shadowy beside the characters and adventures in the Younger Son. Yet how romantic it is: the courtship of Zela, the daring of the Java prince, the adventures in Borneo, are narrated with a poetry and fire that is rare in English prose. The spirit of adventure it raises in the reader is not easily allayed: there are those whom it has sent to sea.

To those who know their Dumas it will appear only natural that a translation of the Younger Son, with an introduction by the great man, should be found in the list of his writings under the title of “Un Cadet de Famille.” Five English editions of the Younger Son have been published in all, counting the present one, and the book was reprinted in New York in 1834.

Towards the close of 1831 a Dr. Millingen, who had attended Byron on his death-bed, published “Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece,” which contained a fictitious and rather disparaging account of Trelawny. The unreliability of Millingen's remarks may be gauged by his statement that the adventurous Cornishman, though of powerful make, was rather under the middle height. A passage quoted in a review of the book in The Literary Gazette called forth a reply from Trelawny, then at Florence, and he posted it to Mary Shelley, with a request to forward it to the editor, Jerdan. The reply appeared in The Literary Gazette of February 12, 1831, and beginning with an account of the affairs of Greece in 1824, ends with a scathing exposure of Millingen's character and pretensions. We do not know whether the latter ever replied to the following challenge, probably not: “I have only to add that it is probable I should not have thus troubled you by replying to Dr. Millingen with my pen, had it been possible to reach him with my hand; but the renegade Dr. Millingen is settled at Constantinople, protected by the firman of the Porte.”

Trelawny returned again to England in 1832, but, although the Reform Bill had passed, he found no “opening among the demagogues.” Mrs. Shelley, who had written to him in 1831 that her name “would never be Trelawny,” to which, half piqued, half relieved, he had replied, “I was more delighted with your resolve not to change your name than with any other portion of your letter,” was still on the most friendly terms with him. In 1834 he set off for America, and visited both the Northern and Southern States. It is said that he attempted to swim the rapids above Niagara, and was picked up insensible on the other side; and that when he was in the South a slave-owner offered to make over his estate to him if he would stay and settle there; but we can only record, not authenticate, these two anecdotes. He returned to England in September, 1835, at which date he is said to have gone much into society, although two years later, in a letter to Lady Blessington, he describes himself as a recluse. From another letter of his in 1835, we may judge that he became one of Mrs. Norton's numerous admirers. This flame may have lasted as long as his others, for in September of the following year he writes from Hastings to Mrs. Shelley: “So now farewell to Love and Womankind. ‘Othello's occupation's gone.’” As he was to marry a third time, this pathetic quotation may be taken in a Trelawnian sense. Thenceforward his life was a quiet one: the days of his travels and adventures were over, and after living for a number of years at Putney Hill, he took a farm at Usk, in Monmouthshire, and settled down to agriculture. He said afterwards that whereas “every man of forty wants to take a farm,” he “made it pay.” If so, he had good luck.

In 1858 he published the Recollections of Shelley and Byron. If Trelawny's first book showed his brilliancy, the second proves his power. The Recollections are admirably clear, terse, and to the point. Trelawny draws the characters of Byron and Shelley in sharp and faithful outline, and it is impossible not to yield to his judgment, and admire the vigour with which he delivers it. His insight into Shelley's genius is profound: if others felt equal sympathy for Shelley, it is he who has best expressed it. A certain roughness in the style and in the construction of the book adds to the impression the reader receives of fidelity to fact. Trelawny has been censured for his harsh picture of Byron, but, in our opinion, unjustly. He drew Byron as he was, and not as his admirers wished to think him. That Shelley's poetry should be so universally underrated, his character misunderstood, and his principles misrepresented, while a man, far inferior in mind and heart, should receive greater homage and glory than his due—this was the indignant thought that took expression in the Recollections “By the gods,” wrote Trelawny to Mary Shelley in 1824, “the lies that are said in his (Byron's) praise urge one to tell the truth.” Trelawny may, or may not, have been jealous of Byron, but there is not a single word attributed to him in the Recollections that one feels was not spoken by him. If we want to understand Byron's character, his genius and its limits, we must turn to the Recollections. It may be urged that Trelawny, as an old friend of Byron's, should either have held his tongue or concealed the truth. To this it may be replied that Trelawny was by no means led by the desire of self-glorification or any meaner motive to publish what he knew. He had conceived the idea of writing Shelley's life and vindicating his character as early as 1829, but his intention was frustrated by Mrs. Shelley refusing him materials. Not till Trelawny was sixty-six did he publish the Recollections—at an age when he could no longer delay, if the wrong were to be set right. The current estimate of Byron and Shelley has been much influenced by the unimpeached Recollections. Love for Shelley's memory undoubtedly it was that led Trelawny to their publication.

In his latter years Trelawny seems to have lost much of his vanity, and he impressed his friends more by his ruggedness of character and unconventionality than by his versatility. Time had disillusionized him of his conceits, the men of his day were dead, his pet ideas were assimilated, supplanted, or exploded. The fringed garments of Byronic romance were ousted by the tweeds of Free Trade. Trelawny had to draw back into his shell, and tone down his fine enthusiasm.

About 1870, Trelawny, then seventy-eight years old, bought a house and a small piece of land at Sompting, a village a few miles from Worthing. “I go into the country to exercise my body,” he said, “and into town to exercise my brain,” and in “attending to his garden, chopping faggots, and taking walks,” he succeeded in keeping up his bodily strength for a long time. Some characteristic anecdotes are related of his latter years, worth the telling. It is said that several times he was known to come back from his walks without a coat, having taken it from his back and given it to a beggar. It is also said that he was very fond of animals and birds, and would never have them molested if he could prevent it, and that on two men one day appearing with guns and asking leave to shoot a bird that had taken refuge on his ground, he answered: “What I will give you is—full permission to shoot one another.” He always declared he “liked animals about the house,” and was in the habit of bringing in pets he had picked up in his walks. He retained his good looks to the last, a description of him as an old man recording “his deep-set, eagle eye.” His habits were simple, his diet extremely abstemious, consisting largely of bread and fruit. “I always live as the natives,” he was fond of saying, not counting the inhabitants of Sompting as “natives.” His powerful voice those who heard it could never forget; his “Tremendous!” being indeed tremendous, even fifty years after Mrs. Shelley wrote: “Sometimes I flattered myself that the foundations of my little habitation would have been shaken by a ‘Ship Shelley ahoy’ that even Jane, distant a mile, would have heard.” In an obituary in The Athenaeum, written by somebody who was obviously acquainted with Trelawny, it is stated as an instance of his freshness of mind that, meeting with Blake's poems for the first time, a few years before death, he showed his appreciation of them by learning several passages by heart. It may be noted that he was always fond of poetry, and constantly in the habit of quoting it.

In 1878 appeared the second and enlarged edition of the Recollections under the new title of Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author. Some interesting particulars about Shelley were added, and some of the criticisms on Byron toned down. Trelawny has been justly condemned for his disparagement of Mrs. Shelley in his Appendix. However true his revised description of her may have appeared to him, he should not have put to paper the failings of the woman whom he had served, and who had served him, so well. There was not the slightest need for it; even if her novels published after Shelley's death were “more than ordinarily commonplace and conventional,” which is not the case, it was mere spleen to call attention to it. This unfortunate Appendix was not, however, published till age had perhaps left Trelawny few indeed of some of the things he believed in in 1858. His asperity can be excused in a man of eighty-six.

Trelawny died of old age at Sompting, on August 13, 1881, at the age of eighty-eight. In accordance with his wish expressed to Mrs. Shelley in 1823, and often repeated in his latter days, that he should be buried by Shelley's side, his adopted niece, Miss Taylor, had his body embalmed in England and cremated at Gotha; and, through her care, his ashes now lie in the Protestant burying-ground in Rome, in the tomb he had bought fifty-eight years before, when he had reinterred his friend.

II.

The most interesting, though the least faithful, portrait of Trelawny is the one lately engraved in “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; her Life and Letters,” after a painting by Severn. The portrait by D'Orsay is a much better likeness, but Severn's is a clever study of half the man, of the theatrical Trelawny in short: we see a proud and defiant face, dark flashing eyes, long black locks, a man of determined bearing, yet with a mysterious and theatrical air. The face might have been drawn for one of Byron's mysterious heroes; one expects to find “Lara” written beneath it, or the name of some Spanish guerilla chief, but not the English, E. J. Trelawny. “In January, 1823,” to quote Mary Shelley's words, “this extravagant Trelawny—un giovane stravagante—of Herculean form, with raven black hair, overhanging brows, Moorish face, and high shoulders, like an Oriental, appeared at Pisa,” and soon becomes intimate with both Shelley and Byron, for which purpose indeed he had quitted England. Trelawny, continues Mrs. Shelley, has an emphatic but unmodulated voice, uses simple and energetic language, and tells horrific stories, with the most frightful situations; his adventures must have happened to him between the ages of seventeen and twenty. His extravagance struck his hearers, as “partly natural, and partly put on, but it suits him well, and if his abrupt and not unpolished manners be assumed, they are nevertheless in unison with his Moorish face. …” Such is the impression Trelawny produced at the age of twenty-nine on Mrs. Shelley—an impression that he would have been well content to have left on his fellows. Her description is one of the unreal yet real Trelawny, for if it was his nature to pose, he felt genuinely the parts he acted. The greater the actor the more difficult is it to get a hold of his character; the critic who deals with Edmund Kean finds himself considering Richard III.; Salvini is best examined as Othello, and this is the difficulty of judging Trelawny. His admirers may claim that he excels even actors in vanity, but his enemies will admit that he yields in this respect to poets. If we identify him with the Younger Son—and Trelawny deliberately wrote it as the history of his life, or rather said he wrote it as such—we see him the most romantic of romantic figures, proud, daring to the utmost degree, fiery, untameable, passionate, with an unquenchable thirst for liberty, and a detestation of every form of restraint. If we are to judge him by his letters to Mary Shelley, we see him impetuous and generous it is true, but changeable, unsteady of purpose, and an inveterate poseur, now writing, “I am sick at heart with losing my friend (Byron), for still I call him so, you know; with all his weaknesses you know I loved him. I cannot live with men for years without feeling—it is weak, it is want of judgment, of philosophy—but this is my weakness. … No more a nameless being. I am now a Greek chieftain, willing and able to shelter and protect you;” and now, “It is well for his name, and better for Greece that Byron is dead. … I now feel my face burn with shame that so weak and ignoble a soul could so long have influenced me. It is a degrading reflection, and ever will be. I wish he had lived a little longer that he might have witnessed how I would have soared above him here, how I would have triumphed over his mean spirit.” And if we are to judge him by his doings as well as his words, we find this “Greek chieftain, who will thus continue or follow his friends to wander some other planet—for he has nearly exhausted this”—this hero, who “has not been a passive instrument of arbitrary despotism,” is detained at Zante for ten months by a “villainous lawsuit, which may yet continue some months longer.” And further, if we are to judge him by his second book, the Recollections of Shelley and Byron, he appears acute, and even hard, a stern yet subtle judge of character, and his narrative, far from bearing out what Byron is reported to have said of him, “that he could not, even to save his life, tell the truth,” strikes the reader as being faithful to the smallest detail.

Trelawny, in short, was all these characters, as Kean might be Richard and yet Othello. Of Cornish blood, he united to natural English stubbornness and ruggedness an imagination and versatility that were certainly not English. It is said that from his grandmother he inherited a Spanish strain; and if this be so, much in his character is explained. High-spirited, fiery, and impulsive, he threw himself first into one part, then into another; now, “I have laid down the sword for the pen,” now (three months later), “I am deeply engaged in a wild scheme which will lead me to the East, and it is firmly my belief that when I again leave Europe it will be for ever,” and now (two months later), “if I thought there was a probability that I could get a seat in the reformed House of Commons I would go to England, or if there was a probability of revolution.” Of course it must be remembered that in writing to so sympathetic and sentimental a woman as Mary Shelley, Trelawny would naturally wish to keep up his romantic character, but against this must be set the fact that their intimacy was of so confidential and friendly a character that he would lay bare his hopes, plans, and fears more fully to her than to anybody else. From this quickness of entering into projects, equal readiness in deserting them, and acuteness, when not moved by first enthusiasm, there seems to be two Trelawnys in the field—the one ready to imitate and follow De Ruyter, Byron, and Odysseus in turn, very anxious to play a good part, devoted to women, setting his heart on being looked on as a romantic figure, and proud of “being ruled by impulse, and not by reason”; the other reserved, independent, and clear-sighted, setting men at their true value, with a contempt for their weaknesses, and mingling the sturdiness of an old salt with the hardheadedness of a man of the world. It is true that the former of these characters certainly appertains more to Trelawny's youth, and the latter to his old age, but throughout we find them blended: he is always alternately alluding to “his wild career through life,” and growing reticent, almost mysterious, about it.

The contradiction of this character, at odds with itself, is in his blood, and accordingly shows itself in his style. The style of the Younger Son, though ungrammatical, is simple, the sentences are energetic and abrupt as those of a seaman, but his language is high-coloured, poetical, and often high-flown. His sailor's grief at the death of Zela is expressed with the delicacy of a poet. The salt of the sea, and the scent of flowers mingle in the book. Trelawny has indeed a Gascon strain in him. He is brave, so he would be thought even braver than he is; he has seen much, so he writes, “I have nearly exhausted this planet”; he has had some adventures, so he says he has passed through others; his virtues spring much from his vices, and his vices still more from his virtues. He is passionate, so he stimulates his passions by art, and prides himself on being led astray by them. He sets up a harem in Athens, and buys a Moorish woman, as much from the desire to be singular as for pleasure. Vanity and ability are often the leading features in the character of the true adventurer; they certainly were in Trelawny's. Julius Millingen's statement that Trelawny imitated Odysseus so minutely that he ate, dressed, and even spat in his manner is obviously hearsay, if not malice, but it admirably hits off the weakness in his character. And he has other points which betray his Spanish blood. A peculiar contempt for the abilities of others, a vaunting and lofty insolence often peeps out in his correspondence. It is not that this contempt had no foundation, it is the peculiar expression of it that seems foreign to the English spirit. Thus when he writes, “Believe nothing you hear. Gamba will tell you everything about me—about Lord Byron, but he knows nothing of Greece, nothing; nor does it appear that anybody else does, from what I see published,” he is not so far from the truth; but it is the combination of vanity and assurance that moves one to smile when one remembers that “Odysseus, the man of most wonderful mind,” was worsted by “the poor, weak, shuffling, intriguing, cowardly fellow,” and it was this same “shuffling soldier” Mavrocordato, that caused Trelawny, who was so “certain of the good cause triumphing,” who had wished Byron was alive “to show him how he would have soared above him,” to fly the country eighteen months later. It is, however, only as an amusing sequel to Trelawny's boasts, and no reflection on his ability, that he was eventually outwitted in Greece, where swarmed “three thousand adventurers”; for his ability is sufficiently attested by his enterprise, readiness of resource, and quickness of action.

Trelawny was born fifty years too late to become an adventurer proper, but his adventurous spirit saw its affinity in, and turned towards, the romantic movement in literature. It is characteristic of his genius, and a tribute to his intellectual power, that he so quickly caught and reflected the spirit of his age. He was as far in advance of the average man in the acceptation and assimilation of liberal ideas as Shelley and Byron were in the creation of them. And his prompt recognition of the spirit of the age did not only consist in “deranging his hair.” He deranged his hair, but he also helped to derange the collection of petrified codes and fossil theories of the day. To his credit be it said, he, almost alone of men, sought out Shelley, and saw his true value. There is undoubtedly a certain amount of hollow declamation in his diatribes on Liberty, but it is not for this generation to criticise the speeches of any of the men who vigorously attacked and demolished the bigotry in religious and social matters so strong in the early part of this century. Trelawny is consistent where consistency is most valuable—he remained true to his principles—he was a staunch Liberal of the 1820 school, believed firmly in liberty both for nations and the individual, and always spoke out against oppression. Born before the Reign of Terror, he lived to see the deadweight of Toryism, the backwater, so to speak, created by the French Revolution, drain slowly off England, he saw Italy expel the Austrian, and Greece the Turk. It was not without cause that he wrote in 1831: “We shall no longer be hooted at: it is our turn to triumph now. Would those glorious spirits to whose genius the present age owes so much could witness the triumphant success of these opinions! I think I see Shelley's fine eyes glisten, and faded cheek glow with fire unearthly.” Trelawny's appeal to France (at the end of the Younger Son) to show herself in her true glory, must have read a little ironically in the days of Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon; but his prophecy that “the theories of tyrants all over the world are shaken as by an earthquake: they may be propped up for a time, but their fall is inevitable,” was redeemed by the events of 1848.

“It is a bustling world at present, and likely so to continue. I must play a part.” These words of Trelawny may serve to sum up his character. His failings are apparent, perhaps more so than his virtues, such is the uncertainty attendant on “playing a part.” We may, without error, echo the words of Mrs. Shelley in 1823: “I have a perfect faith in the unalterable goodness of his heart.” She had reason to say this, for after Shelley's death, at a time when she was much pressed for money, Trelawny, “with quiet generosity,” shared with her the little he had. Very convincing of the truth of the Recollections is the little picture she paints us of the two men sailing away together to Greece, Trelawny with only fifty pounds left him, Byron with his £10,000, and some of the dead Shelley's money still in his pockets. “I can never remember without the liveliest sense of gratitude all you said that night of agony when you returned to Lerici,” she writes to Trelawny; three months after Shelley's death—at too recent a date to be construed as a mere sentimentality, a piece with her entry in her Journal six months later, “Albé, the dear, capricious, fascinating Albé is dead. … Can I forget his attentions and consolations to me during my deepest misery?—Never,” forgetting that the dear, capricious Albé had behaved with such meanness that she had been forced to refuse to touch a penny of his money. From all accounts Trelawny behaved with great generosity throughout his life. “In the midst of his agony,” says the historian Gordon, “he had the magnanimity to dismiss unharmed the unhappy youth who fired at him.” Probably there are those still living who have cause to be thankful for his liberality.

In the long run individuals come to be judged by their acts, and not by what they have said of themselves. Thus should it be with Trelawny. His favourite maxim, “Believe nothing you hear, and only half what you see,” may be applied with advantage to himself. If, to quote Mrs. Shelley again, he was “one who wished to be thought eccentric,” he was “noble and generous at bottom.” And with all his affectation he was thorough fearless.