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 its part, what they hate--the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct. FOOTNOTE: [13] "Letters of Edward John Trelawny." Edited, with a brief Introduction and Notes, by H. Buxton Forman. (Frowde.) SOPHOCLES IN LONDON I [Sidenote: _"OEdipus" at Covent Garden_] [Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1912_]