men--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 L500 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 j