"Vigour and directness," "transparent honesty and complete fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century [the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there is more to be said--for instance, that Trelawny sometimes reminds us of an extraordinarily intelligent schoolboy, at others of a rather morbid minor poet. Only, the vitality of few schoolboys amounts almost to genius, and minor poets are not always blest with feelings fundamentally sound. Most of his vices were the defects of good qualities. A powerful imagination may be fairly held accountable for his habit of romancing, and a brave vocabulary for some of his exaggeration. His vanity and violence--as childish as his love of mystery, and often as childishly displayed--were forms in which his high spirits and passionate nature expressed themselves. Art, in the shape of a bad education, aggravated his faults; but his honesty and imagination, his generosity and childlike capacity for admiration and affection were from nature alone. He was a schoolboy who never grew up; cultivating his cabbages at Worthing in 1875, he is essentially the same shrewd, passionate, romantic scapegrace who deserted his ship in Bombay harbour soon after the battle of Trafalgar, and burnt Shelley's body on the foreshore at Via Reggio. Like all boys, Trelawny was exceedingly impressionable, and at the beginning of this book we find him under the influence of the learned ladies of Pisa. Left to himself, he wrote with point and vigour prose as rich in colour and spirit as it is poor in grammar and spelling. His letter to the _Literary Gazette_, published in this volume, is a good example of his narrative style. But even his style could be perverted: "I must give you the consolation of knowing--that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures--that your letter has inflicted an incurable wound which is festering and inflaming my blood--and my pride and passion, warring against my ungovernable love, has in vain essayed to hide my wounded feelings--by silently submitting to my evil destiny." So he wrote to Claire Clairmont in December 1822; but under the language of the minor romantic throbs the lusty passion of a man.