Any one who has read Trelawny's recollections of Shelley and Byron must know that their author was something much more considerable than a friend of the great. Any one who, lured by that enchanting book, has gone on to the "Adventures of a Younger Son" may be pardoned for supposing, if we are really to take it for autobiography, that its author was a stupendous liar. Just what he was—the man who wrote those enthralling memoirs and that excellent romance—may now be pretty well made out from this collection of old and new letters put together by Mr. Buxton Forman.

"Vigour and directness," "transparent honesty and complete fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century [the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there is more to be said—for instance, that Trelawny sometimes reminds us of an extraordinarily intelligent schoolboy, at others of a rather morbid minor poet. Only, the vitality of few schoolboys amounts almost to genius, and minor poets are not always blest with feelings fundamentally sound. Most of his vices were the defects of good qualities. A powerful imagination may be fairly held accountable for his habit of romancing, and a brave vocabulary for some of his exaggeration. His vanity and violence—as childish as his love of mystery, and often as childishly displayed—were forms in which his high spirits and passionate nature expressed themselves. Art, in the shape of a bad education, aggravated his faults; but his honesty and imagination, his generosity and childlike capacity for admiration and affection were from nature alone. He was a schoolboy who never grew up; cultivating his cabbages at Worthing in 1875, he is essentially the same shrewd, passionate, romantic scapegrace who deserted his ship in Bombay harbour soon after the battle of Trafalgar, and burnt Shelley's body on the foreshore at Via Reggio.

Like all boys, Trelawny was exceedingly impressionable, and at the beginning of this book we find him under the influence of the learned ladies of Pisa. Left to himself, he wrote with point and vigour prose as rich in colour and spirit as it is poor in grammar and spelling. His letter to the Literary Gazette, published in this volume, is a good example of his narrative style. But even his style could be perverted:

"I must give you the consolation of knowing—that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures—that your letter has inflicted an incurable wound which is festering and inflaming my blood—and my pride and passion, warring against my ungovernable love, has in vain essayed to hide my wounded feelings—by silently submitting to my evil destiny."

So he wrote to Claire Clairmont in December 1822; but under the language of the minor romantic throbs the lusty passion of a man.

Shelley's influence was great; with him Trelawny was always natural and always at his best; but Shelley was a wizard who drew the pure metal from every ore. With Byron it was different. Trelawny was almost as vain as "the Pilgrim of Eternity," as sensitive, and, when hurt, as vindictive. He was jealous of Byron's success with women—they were two of a trade—and especially of his relations with Claire. When Byron posed Trelawny posed, and when the one sulked the other sulked; but was any man except Shelley big enough to brook his lordship's moods? That Byron valued Trelawny is certain; he invited him to Greece because he knew his worth. Once arrived, Byron had the wit to perceive that Mavrocordato, albeit the meanest of masters, was the best and most serviceable to be had at the moment. Trelawny, as was to be expected, fell under the spell of Odysseus, at that time in more or less open revolt against the provisional government, but an adventurer of fierce and reckless spirit, in manner and appearance a romantic outlaw, a man after his own heart. Henceforth Byron is reckoned at best a dupe, and at worst a sluggish poltroon; while Trelawny, it is said, imitated his hero so loyally that "he ate, dressed, and even spat in his manner." When the poet died Trelawny spoke with characteristic feeling:

"With all his faults I loved him truly.... If it gave me pain witnessing his frailties, he only wanted a little excitement to awaken and put forth virtues that redeemed them all."

But the iron had entered into his soul, old sores rankled, he could not forgive; to the last he was willing to pay back his rival in his own coin—sneers and abuse.

As Trelawny could scarcely write to a woman without making love to her, and as his relations with Mary Shelley were necessarily emotional and intimate, an ambiguous proposal and a handful of affectionate letters will not persuade us that he ever cared more seriously for her than for scores of others. Though some letters must have been written when he was courting the sister of Odysseus or keeping a harem at Athens, and others when his heart was disengaged, can any one decide which are sincere and which are not? Or, rather, are they not all equally sincere? The following extract may help us to a conclusion:

"I say! the poet [Shelley] was a thorough mormon—why did he not declare himself and anticipate the sect? I would have joined him and found him a settlement—it would not hold together without a superstition—for man all over the world are [sic] superstitious—it's the nature of the animal—your mother was a simpleton to have never heard of a man being in love with two women; when we are young we are in love with all women—the bible would call it by its proper name, lust."

So wrote Trelawny in 1869 (he had recovered his style) to Claire Clairmont. His letters to her, now published for the first time, compose the largest and liveliest part of the volume. If he cared for one woman more than another, we believe that woman was Claire. She was not good, but she has been more than sufficiently reviled. For Trelawny that she was beautiful sufficed; let it satisfy the vindictiveness of virtue that she suffered horribly. What precisely was the degree of their intimacy is not clear; but, in view of Claire's reputation and certain passages in these letters, it is perhaps not unfair to suppose that at any rate for a short time in the year 1822 she was his mistress. Be that as it may, after Shelley's death they parted, and doubtless it will be said she treated her lover ill. To us it appears that he gave as good as he got. She was mercenary, and he was inconstant. If we read Letter XX aright, when she did offer, after some months of prudent dalliance, to live with him at Florence, he replied that he had but £500 a year, which was not enough for two. An establishment on the confines of respectability was the last thing he desired. Neither ever loved truly; but Trelawny, for a time, felt violent physical passion for the woman whose head and shoulders remind us of what dealers call a Giorgione. Such is the story, so far as we can deduce it from these letters; each, if our conjecture serve, was partially satisfied, for in money matters Trelawny always treated his lady handsomely, though he could not or would not give her what most she wanted—material security.

He never lost his taste for Claire; and on the ruins of their bitter and agitated relations was built a kind of friendship, in which expansion and intimacy and malice were all possible, and which is aptly commemorated by these vivid and entertaining letters. As for Mary, her character deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike to disprove it:

"Mary Shelley's jealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley—indeed she was not a suitable companion for the poet—his first wife Harriett must have been more suitable—Mary was the most conventional slave I ever met—she even affected the pious dodge, such was her yearning for society—she was devoid of imagination and Poetry—she felt compunction when she had lost him—she did not understand or appreciate him."

There are two big gaps in the correspondence with Claire: one from 1838 to 1857, the other from 1857 to 1869. At the age of seventy-seven we find Trelawny still unchanged: "All my early convictions and feelings harden with my bones—age has not tamed or altered me." He had lived through the wildest adventures: in a cave on Mount Parnassus he had been shot through the body and had pardoned one of his assailants; he had swum the rapids below Niagara; he had played the pirate in the South Seas and flirted with Mrs. Norton in Downing Street; and now, a veteran and something of a lion, he astonished London parties with his gasconade and the Sussex fisher-folk with his bathing exploits. We can believe that his conversation was "brilliant," but "most censorious"; his letters to Claire give some idea of it: "Women have taken to gin—men have always done so, now it's women's turn"; "—— is as gross and fat as —— and from the same cause—gluttony and sotting—it's all the fashion."

And here we would interpose a query—Was it really necessary to suppress the names? This elaborate and unscholarly tenderness for the feelings of the friends and relations of the dead, and for those of their descendants even, is becoming, in our judgment, a nuisance. Had people been so fussy and timid always we should have no history worth reading. After all, men, and women too for that matter, have got to stand on their own feet. We are not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will think at all the worse of Mr. Smith because some lively diarist has hinted that his great maiden aunt was no such thing: neither will any one think much the worse of the old lady. Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say that the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly have known anything about it. The past belongs to the present, and the dead are in some sort public property. It is not well, we think, that history should be impoverished, and an instrument of culture blunted, out of regard for the feelings of stray nephews and nieces, and we commend to editors and biographers the saying of that undergraduate who to his friend's complaint—"Hi, Johnnie, you've shot my father," replied, with a truly British sense of give and take—"Never mind, have a shot at mine."

Poor Claire became devout in old age and provoked a comprehensive growl from Shelley's untamed friend: "I am not one of that great sect whose vanity, credulity, and superstition makes them believe in God—the devil—souls and immortality." Yet with what cheerful wisdom he laughs away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest lover: "Your relentless vindictiveness against Byron is not tolerated by any religion that I know of"; while through the rack of jibes, malisons, and ebullitions of wilfulness shines steadily his veneration for the great poet he loved:

"You say he [Shelley] was womanly in some things—so he was, and we men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling, sentiment, earnestness, and constancy; but in all the best qualities of man he excelled."

Through these letters—through all Trelawny's writings—runs a wonderful sense of power. He was not one to seek out the right word or prune a sentence; his strength is manifest in his laxities. He believed that no task, intellectual or physical, was beyond him; so he wrote as he swam, taking his ease, glorying in his vitality, secure in a reserve of strength equal to anything. A sense of power and a disregard for syntax—these are his literary characteristics. He read Shakespeare and Shelley, and it is not clear that he cared greatly for much besides; he liked Swinburne, and was profoundly interested in Darwin. Late in life he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for its part, what they hate—the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct.