to editors and
biographers the saying of that undergraduate who to his friend's
complaint--"Hi, Johnnie, you've shot my father," replied, with a truly
British sense of give and take--"Never mind, have a shot at mine."

Poor Claire became devout in old age and provoked a comprehensive growl
from Shelley's untamed friend: "I am not one of that great sect whose
vanity, credulity, and superstition makes them believe in God--the
devil--souls and immortality." Yet with what cheerful wisdom he laughs
away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra
was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but
you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible
cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow
you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He
tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest
lover: "Your relentless vindictiveness against Byron is not tolerated by
any religion that I know of"; while through the rack of jibes, malisons,
and ebullitions of wilfulness shines steadily his veneration for the
great poet he loved:

"You say he [Shelley] was womanly in some things--so he was, and we
men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling,
sentiment, earnestness, and constancy; but in all the best
qualities of man he excelled."

Through these letters--through all Trelawny's writings--runs a wonderful
sense of power. He was not one to seek out the right word or prune a
sentence; his strength is manifest in his laxities. He believed that no
task, intellectual or physical, was beyond him; so he wrote as he swam,
taking his ease, glorying in his vitality, secure in a reserve of
strength equal to anything. A sense of power and a disregard for
syntax--these are his literary characteristics. He read Shakespeare and
Shelley, and it is not clear that he cared greatly for much besides; he
liked Swinburne, and was profoundly interested in Darwin. Late in life
he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in
literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life
he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an
oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way
that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting
sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for
it