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 "Recolections"-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 Athenæum, 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, 1822," 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 con