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.