HE 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 nar rative 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 "Younger Son"; 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 |