Cornish Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Biography; Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
And when, in 1858, he published his _Recollections of Shelley and
Byron_, thirty-four years after the death of the latter, he painted
Byron in the harshest colours; and one can hardly escape feeling that
this was prompted by jealousy of the esteem in which the world held
Byron for his genius. He himself possessed all the bad qualities that
he despised in Byron, but did not recognize in himself the superadded
brutality which Byron was too much a gentleman to show.
Even Mrs. Shelley, a lifelong friend and correspondent, to whom he had
often poured out his heart, and whom he had contemplated at one time
marrying, could not be spoken of by him after her death but in
disparagement and with a revelation to the world of her little
weaknesses.
He was in England again in 1835, went into society, and married for
the third time, to make another woman miserable. For a number of years
he lived at Putney Hill, and then took a farm at Usk, in
Monmouthshire, and amused himself with farming.
In or about 1870, Trelawny, then seventy-eight years old, bought a
house and a small plot of land at Sompting, near Wortham, and occupied
himself with gardening. One day two men with guns in their hands
requested permission to enter his grounds after a bird that had taken
refuge there. He answered fiercely, "All the leave I will accord you
is to shoot one another."
At Sompting, Trelawny died on August 13th, 1881, at the age of
eighty-six. In accordance with his wish to be laid beside Shelley, his
body was embalmed in England, cremated at Gotha, and the ashes taken
to the Protestant burial-ground in Rome, and laid in the tomb he had
bought fifty-eight years before, next to those of his friend.
Trelawny was a very handsome man, tall and well built; he had flashing
dark eyes under beetling brows, and an aquiline nose, raven-black
hair, and a dusky, Spanish complexion. He spoke very loud. He retained
his good looks to the end of his days.
Shelley described him in _Fragments of an Unfinished Drama_:--
He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest.
In Millais' painting of "The North-West Passage," exhibited in the
Royal Academy in 1874, the old sailor is a portrait of Captain
Trelawny; and it has been conjectured that Thackeray delineated him as
Captain Sumph in _Pendennis_, I, cap. 35.
The authorities for Trelawny's life are, beside the first part of his
_Adventures of a Younger Son_, his _Recollections of Shelley and
Byron_, 1858; the new edition of the work, published in 1878, was
called _Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author_.
Mr. R. Garnett has a notice of the life of Trelawny prefixed to the
edition of the _Adventures of a Younger Son_ of 1890. A lengthy life
of Trelawny is in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. An error in
this is pointed out by Mr. T. C. Down in the article on "Pirate
Trelawny" already referred to and quoted from.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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