Trelawney, EDWARD JOHN

Trelawney, EDWARD JOHN, a venturesome Cornishman whose name is strangely linked with the names of Shelley and Byron, sprang from a famous and ancient family, was born in 1792, and entered the navy at eleven. Harsh treatment, together with a native spirit of insubordination, made him desert, and he is said next to have joined a privateer, and to have lived a life of desperate enterprises in the Indian and Malay Seas. In January 1822 he made the acquaintance of Shelley at Pisa, and it was he who took the chief part in the burning of the poet's body in August on the shore near Via Reggio. Next year he accompanied Byron to Greece, and there remained some time after Byron's death, attached to the fortunes of the chief Odysseus, who came to be more or less in open opposition to the government. Once while sheltering in the cave of Odysseus a treacherous Englishman shattered Trelawney's jaw with a bullet; but he, with characteristic magnanimity and though himself expecting death, saved the wretch from the vengeance of his men and sent him away in safety. Trelawney next travelled in North and South America, lived awhile in Italy, and spent his last years in Monmouthshire or Sussex, dying at his residence at Sompting near Worthing, 13th August 1881. His body was cremated, and the ashes carried to Rome and laid beside the graves of Shelley and Keats. Trelawney was a man of indomitable courage and generous to a fault, but restless, impatient, and completely impracticable. He had scarcely ever had an illness, to the last wore neither overcoat nor underclothing, took scarce any animal food, and was almost abstemious throughout his life. Remarkably handsome in youth, in old age his presence was no less striking. He sat for the old Arctic voyager in Millais's well-known picture, 'The North-west Passage.' Trelawney published two books, The Adventures of a Younger Son (1830; new ed. 1890), a vivid though ill-constructed story, based on the adventures of his own youth; and Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), re-issued in 1878 with considerable changes as Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. The importance of the latter is of course almost altogether relative; it reveals considerable power of insight into character, and betrays, as might have been expected, much greater sympathy for Shelley than for Byron.