Somerset Street, 2d October 1831.

My dear Trelawny—I suppose that I have now some certain intelligence to send you, though I fear that it will both disappoint and annoy you. I am indeed ashamed that I have not been able to keep these people in better order, but I trusted to honesty, when I ought to have ensured it; however, thus it stands: your book is to be published in the course of the month, and then your bills are to be dated. As soon as I get them I will dispose of them as you direct, and you will receive notice on the subject without delay. I cannot procure for you a copy until then; they pretend that it is not all printed. If I can get an opportunity I will send you one by private hand, at any rate I shall send them by sea without delay. I will write to Smith about negotiating your bills, and I have no doubt that I shall be able somehow or other to get you money on them. I will go myself to the City to pay Barr’s correspondent as soon as I get the cash. Thus your pretty dear (how fascinating is flattery) will do her best, as soon as these tiresome people fulfil their engagements. In some degree they have the right on their side, as the day of publication is a usual time from which to date the bills, and that was the time which I acceded to; but they talked of such hurry and speed that I expected that that day was nearer at hand than it now appears to be. November is the publishing month, and no new things are coming out now. In fact, the Reform Bill swallows up every other thought. You have heard of the Lords’ majority against it, much longer than was expected, because it was not imagined that so many bishops would vote against Government....

Do whenever you write send me news of Clare. She never writes herself, and we are all excessively anxious about her. I hope she is better. God knows when fate will do anything for us. I despair. Percy is well, I fancy that he will go to Harrow in the spring; it is not yet finally arranged, but this is what I wish, and therefore I suppose it will be, as they have promised to increase my allowance for him, and leave me pretty nearly free, only with Eton prohibited; but Harrow is now in high reputation under a new head-master. I am delighted to hear that Zella is in such good hands, it is so necessary in this world of woe that children should learn betimes to yield to necessity; a girl allowed to run wild makes an unhappy woman.

Hunt has set up a penny daily paper, literary and theatrical; it is succeeding very well, but his health is wretched, and when you consider that his sons, now young men, do not contribute a penny towards their own support, you may guess that the burthen on him is very heavy. I see them very seldom, for they live a good way off, and when I go he is out, she busy, and I am entertained by the children, who do not edify me. Jane has just moved into a house about half a mile further from town, on the same road; they have furnished it themselves. Dina improves, or rather she always was, and continues to be, a very nice child.

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The Adventures did not reach a second edition in their original form; the first edition failed, indeed, to repay its expenses; but they were afterwards republished in Colburn’s Family Library. The second part of Trelawny’s Autobiography took the chatty and discursive form, so popular at the present day, of “Reminiscences.” It is universally known as Recollections[11] of Shelley, Byron, and the Author.

So long as Shelley and Byron survive as objects of interest in this world, so long must this fascinating book share their existence. As originally published, it has not a dull page. Life-like as if written at the moment it all happened, it yet has the pictorial sense of proportion which can rarely exist till a writer stands at such a distance (of time) from the scenes he describes that he can estimate them, not only as they are, but in their relation to surrounding objects. It would seem as if, for the conversations at least, Trelawny must sometimes have drawn on his imagination as well as his memory; if so, it can only be replied that, by his success, he has triumphantly vindicated his artistic right to do so. Terse, original, and characteristic, each speech paints its speaker in colours which we know and feel to be true. Nothing seems set down for effect; it is spontaneous, unstudied, everyday reality. And if the history of Trelawny’s own exploits in Greece somewhat recall the “tarasconnades” of his early adventures, it at least puts a thrilling finish to a book it was hard to conclude without falling into bathos. As a writer on Shelley, Trelawny surely stands alone. Many authors have praised Shelley, others have condemned and decried him, others again have tried to pity and “excuse” him. No one has apprehended as happily as Trelawny the peculiar timbre, if it may be so described, of his nature, or has brought out so vividly, and with so few happy touches, his moral and social characteristics. Saint or sinner, the Shelley of Trelawny is no lay figure, no statue even, no hero of romance; it is Shelley, the man, the boy, the poet. Trelawny assures us that Hogg’s picture of Shelley as a youth is absolutely faithful. But Hogg’s picture only shows us Shelley in his “salad days,” and even that we are never allowed to contemplate without the companion-portrait of the biographer, smiling with cynical amusement while he yields his tribute of heartfelt, but patronising praise.

The conclusions to which Hogg had come by observation Trelawny arrived at by intuition. Fiery and imaginative, his nature was by far the more sympathetic of the two; though it may be that, in virtue of very unlikeness, Hogg would have proved, in the long run, the fitter companion for Shelley.

Between Trelawny and Mary there existed the same kind of adjustable difference. His descriptions of her have been largely drawn upon in earlier chapters of the present work, and need not be reverted to here. She had been seven years dead when the Recollections were published. Twenty years later, when Mary Shelley had been twenty-seven years in her grave, there appeared a second edition of the book. In those twenty years, what change had come over the spirit of its pages? An undefinable difference, like that which comes over the face of Nature when the wind changes from west to east,—and yet not so undefinable either, for it had power to reverse some very definite facts. Byron’s feet, for instance, which—as the result of an investigation after death—were described, in 1858, as having, both, been “clubbed and withered to the knee,” “the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr,” are, in 1878, pronounced to have been faultless, but for the contraction of the back sinews (the “Tendon Achilles”), which prevented his heels from resting on the ground. “Unfortunately,” to quote Mr. Garnett’s comment on this discrepancy, in his article on Shelley’s Last Days, “as in the natural world the same agencies that are elevating one portion of the earth’s surface are at the same time depressing another, so, in the microcosm of Mr. Trelawny’s memory and judgment, the embellishment of Lord Byron’s feet has been accompanied by a corresponding deterioration of Mrs. Shelley’s heart and head.”

Yes; the Mary Shelley with whom, in early days, even Trelawny could find no fault, save perhaps for a tendency to mournfulness in solitude and an occasional fit of literary abstraction when she might have been looking after the commissariat—who in later years was his trusty friend, his sole correspondent, his literary editor, his man of business—and withal his “pretty dear” “every day dearer” to him, “Mary—my Mary”—superior surely to the rest of her sex, with whom at one time it seems plain enough that he would have been nothing loth to enter into an alliance, offensive and defensive, for life, would she but have preferred the name of Trelawny to that of Shelley,—this Mary whose voice had been silent for seven and twenty years, and to whom he himself had raised a monument of praise, rises from her tomb as conventional and commonplace, unsympathetic and jealous, narrow, orthodox, and worldly.