Trelawny

MACMILLAN

TRELAWNY was the most dashing and romantic ‘glamour boy’ of the nineteenth century. He is remembered mainly because he saw both Shelley and Byron ‘plain,’ and wrote what is certainly the most vivid account of them ever written. But when he first met them he had already had ten years of flamboyant adventure, first in the navy, then as a pirate in the East, and after their death he lived on to play many more parts in the world of action, to know Swinburne, Meredith, and Rossetti, and to be painted by Millais. In this very readable biography, we see him from the miseries of his childhood in Cornwall to his extreme old age, cultivating his garden in Sussex: see him marrying an Arab maiden he has rescued from death — and later three other very different women; building Shelley’s funeral pyre; setting off with Byron to fight for Greek liberty; writing ill-spelt love letters to Clare Clairmont; ‘looking like a tiger’ reciting The Isles of Greece to Fanny Kemble on a boat on the Hudson, and nearly drowning himself in an effort to swim the Niagara River just above the falls. What he calls his ‘knight-errant heart’ drove him perpetually into dangers, blunders, and catastrophic relationships, but he proved the truth of his own favorite quotation (spelt in his own way): —

Come what come may

Time and the hour runs through the roughfest day.