Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/184

 air,’ he declared, ‘is the best physician. A man who has once learned to handle his tools loses the relish for play.’ He was abstemious in food and drink, and never wore a great coat. He rejoiced especially in his crops of figs, equal, he averred, to the growths of Italy. The younger generation sought the acquaintance of a man who had consorted with Shelley and Byron, and who, as the years passed on with little apparent effect on his robust constitution, came little by little to be the sole distinguished survivor of the Byronic age. Miss Mathilde Blind, Mr. W. M. Rossetti and Mr. Edgcumbe have left accurate records of his brilliant, original, riveting, but most censorious conversation. In the main it was authentic as well as picturesque, but sometimes the tendency to romance crept in, not only as regarded his own exploits, but less excusably as regarded the deeds or frailties of others. Some of his statements are demonstrably incorrect, others highly improbable. A certain peevishness also grew upon him, painfully evinced in the second edition of his records of Shelley and Byron, enriched with new documents of importance, but where every alteration in the text is a change for the worse. It missed, in fact, the judicious counsel of Mrs. Trelawny, who had happily influenced the first edition. In loyalty to Shelley, however, he never wavered, and he showed freshness of mind by becoming an admiring reader of Blake and a student of Darwin. At length he took to his bed, and died at Sompting on 13 Aug. 1881 of mere natural decay. In accordance with his wishes, Miss Taylor, who had faithfully watched over his closing years, transported his remains to Gotha, where they were cremated and removed to Rome for interment in the grave which he had long ago prepared for himself by the side of Shelley's.

Trelawny's character presents many points of contact with Landor's. His main fault was an intense wilfulness, the exaggeration of a haughty spirit of independence, which rendered him careless of the rights and claims of others, and sometimes betrayed him into absolute brutality. He himself owned that his worst enemy was his determination ‘to get what he wanted, if he had to go through heaven and hell for it.’ His disposition to romance was a minor failing, which has prejudiced him more in public opinion than it need have done; his embellishments rested upon a genuine basis of achievement. His want of regular education was probably of service to him as a writer, enabling him to set forth with forcible plainness of speech what more cultured persons would have disguised in polished verbiage. He is graphic in his descriptions both of men and things; all his characters, real or fictitious, actually live.

Trelawny sat to Sir John Millais for the old seaman in ‘the North-West Passage,’ and this grand head, now hung in the Tate Gallery, though disapproved by himself, is a striking record of his appearance. Seymour Kirkup's portrait, engraved in the ‘Field’ for August 1881, is a good representation of him at an earlier period of life, and a fine photograph taken in old age is engraved as the frontispiece to Mr. Edward Garnett's edition of ‘The Adventures of a Younger Son.’ The portraits by Severn and D'Orsay (1886) are generally condemned. Mrs. Shelley speaks of his Moorish appearance—‘Oriental, not Asiatic’—and the remark is corroborated by Byron's having marked him out to enact Othello.

[The principal authorities for Trelawny's life are his own writings, with an ample margin for scepticism in the case of ‘The Adventures of a Younger Son,’ and after these his letters to Mary Shelley in the biography of her by Mrs. Julian Marshall. Useful abridged lives have been written by Mr. Richard Edgcumbe (‘Edward Trelawny: a Biographical Sketch,’ Plymouth, 1882, 8vo) and by Mr. Edward Garnett, the latter prefixed to the edition of ‘The Younger Son’ (Adventure Series), 1890. All the biographers of Shelley and Byron in their latter days have noticed him, and graphic records of his conversation have been preserved by W. M. Rossetti in the Athenæum for 1882, R. Edgcumbe in Temple Bar, May 1890, and Miss Mathilde Blind in the Whitehall Review of 10 Jan. 1880. See also Boase and Courtney's Bibliotheca Cornubiensis and Boase's Collectanea Cornubiensia, col. 1036 (with details of Trelawny's will); Athenæum, 3 Aug. 1878, 20 Aug. 1881 (obit. notice), and 21 Aug. 1897 (details of the household at Usk); Sharp's Life and Letters of Joseph Severn; Millingen's Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece, pp. 150–53; Fanny Kemble's Records of a Girlhood and Last Records; and R. Garnett's ‘Shelley's Last Days’ in the Fortnightly Review for July 1878. Lines to the memory of Trelawny by Mr. Swinburne appeared in the Athenæum for 27 Aug. 1881, and were reprinted separately. The ‘Songs of the Springtides’ had been dedicated to Trelawny in the previous year.]  TRELAWNY, JOHN (fl. 1422), knight, who claimed descent of a family settled at Trelawne in Cornwall before the Norman conquest, was son of Sir John Trelawny, knt., by Matilda, daughter of Robert Mynwenick. The father held land in the vill of Trelawne by gift of his father, William, in 1366, was the first of the family to receive