ld 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 jeal