This petition and the letter of Mr. Robinson suffice to show that the story of Trelawny sending his dead child in a box to its mother is not to be rejected as a fable, as it has been by the author of the notice on Edward John Trelawny in the _Dictionary of National Biography_.[27] The poor unfortunate girl, then aged seventeen, obtained a separation from her husband _a mensa et thoro_, by a sentence of the Ecclesiastical Court, and by definitive sentences of the courts of law in Zante and Corfu she was entitled to an aliment from her husband of twenty-five dollars a month, for the payment of which Mr. Barff, the banker of Zante, and Mr. Stevens, of Corfu, were securities. But this was the result of much litigation, causing Trelawny annoyance and angering him to the last degree. In the autumn of 1828 he visited England, but returned to the Continent in the spring of the following year, feeling out of his element at home. "To whom am I a neighbour?" he wrote, "and near whom? I dwell amongst tame and civilized human beings with somewhat the same feelings as we may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wildness, he is tortured into domestic intercourse with what Shakespeare calls 'forked animals,' the most abhorrent to his nature." He rambled about; set up a harem in Athens, bought a Moorish girl to be his concubine, wrote his _Adventures of a Younger Son_, and sent the MS. in 1830 to Mrs. Shelley, and it was published in three volumes in 1831, with some excisions of grossness and licentiousness, which the publisher insisted on having removed. As already said, no reliance can be placed on this autobiography as a narrative of the facts of his life, except only of his boyhood, for, as Lord Byron said of Trelawny, "he could not speak the truth even if he wished to do so." When the book appeared, the _Athenæum_ considered the hero--Trelawny himself--"a kind of ruffian from his birth," as he had painted himself, leaving out the villainies and brutalities of which he had been guilty. He was thrice married, and behaved badly to all three wives. He could not be faithful and generous even to his friends. With Byron he had been most intimate, yet when Byron died he wrote to Mary Shelley: "It is well for his name, and better for Greece, that Byron is dead.... I now feel my face burn with shame that so weak and ignoble a soul could so long have influenced me. It is a degrading reflection, and ever will be. I wish he had lived a little longer, that he might have witnessed how I would have soared above him here, how I would have triumphed over his mean spirit." Trelawny soaring!--as a vulture only in quest of carrion.