and in the same year or the next to have become ‘a shackled, care-worn, and spirit-broken married man of the civilised west.’ His wife was a Miss Julia Addison. Details of his life are entirely wanting until, from his own account in ‘The Last Days of Shelley and Byron,’ we find him in the summer of 1820 in Switzerland. While there he came across Thomas Medwin [q. v.], recently arrived from Italy, where he had resumed acquaintance with his cousin Shelley. Medwin's account of the poet induced Trelawny and a new friend, Edward Elliker Williams [q. v.], to resolve on seeking Shelley out. Williams proceeded to Italy in the spring of 1821; Trelawny, recalled to England by business (resulting apparently from the death of his father), delayed until the end of the year, when he went to Tuscany, provided with dogs, guns, and nets, for hunting in the Maremma. His description of his first meetings with Shelley and Byron is one of the most vivid pieces of writing in the language. He remained for the most part in the society of one or both until 8 July, the day on which Shelley and Williams met their tragic end in a squall off Leghorn. Trelawny was to have accompanied them in Byron's yacht; but an informality detained him in port at Leghorn, and he remained with furled sails, watching the doomed vessel through a spyglass until a sea fog enveloped her and ‘we saw nothing more of her.’
The twelvemonth ensuing is the brightest portion of Trelawny's life. Nothing could surpass his devotion to his dead friends and their widowed survivors; he promoted the recovery of the bodies, superintended their cremation on shore, snatched Shelley's heart from the flames, prepared the tomb in the protestant cemetery at Rome, purchased the ground, added the proverbial lines from the ‘Tempest’ to Leigh Hunt's ‘Cor Cordium,’ and crowned his services by providing Mary Shelley with funds for her journey to England.
On 23 July 1823 Trelawny put to sea from Leghorn with Byron in the Hercules, bound for Greece, to aid in the Hellenic struggle for independence. They reached Cephalonia on 3 Aug. Trelawny, dissatisfied with Byron's tardiness in taking action, crossed to the mainland, and joined the insurgent chief Odysseus, whose sister Tersitza he married as his second wife. While discharging a mission with which he had been entrusted by Colonel Leicester Fitzgerald Charles Stanhope (afterwards Earl of Harrington) [q. v.], who speaks of him with the warmest commendation, he heard of Byron's fatal illness, and hurried to Missolonghi, but arrived too late. His gratification of his curiosity as to the cause of Byron's lameness, and his publication of particulars afterwards admitted to be inaccurate, exposed him to great and deserved censure; his letters to Stanhope on Byron's death, printed in Stanhope's ‘Greece’ in 1823 and 1824, are nevertheless couched in fitting language, and should be read in justice both to himself and Byron. ‘With all his faults,’ he says, ‘I loved him truly; if it gave me pain in witnessing his frailties, he only wanted a little excitement to awaken and put forth virtues that redeemed them all.’ Returning to the camp of Odysseus, Trelawny inevitably became mixed up in the intrigues and dissensions of the Greek chieftains. Odysseus, just before his own arrest and murder, entrusted him with the defence of his stronghold on Mount Parnassus, where, in May 1825, he was shot by two Englishmen—Thomas Fenton, a deliberate assassin, and Whitcombe, his dupe. Fenton was killed on the spot. Trelawny, though in a desperate condition and suffering intense pain, magnanimously spared the life of Whitcombe. After long and cruel suffering, he was at length able to depart for Cephalonia, bringing, as would appear, his Greek bride with him; his daughter Zella was born about June 1826. The frequent mention of this child in his subsequent correspondence with Mrs. Shelley, and even later, refutes the story of her death and the treatment of her remains told by J. G. Cooke (Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, p. 265). ‘She has a soul of fire,’ he says in 1831. She eventually married happily.
In April 1826 Trelawny was at Zante, whence he addressed a letter to the ‘Examiner,’ describing the fall of Missolonghi. He remained in the Ionian Islands until the end of 1827, detained, as he informs Mrs. Shelley, by a succession of fevers and a ‘villainous lawsuit.’ In 1828 he was in England, partly, as it would seem, in Cornwall with his mother. In 1829 he lived in Italy with Charles Armitage Brown [q. v.] and his infant daughter. He wished at this time to write the life of Shelley, and solicited Mrs. Shelley's assistance, but, besides Trelawny's special disqualifications and Mrs. Shelley's aversion to publicity, compliance with his request would have deprived her of the allowance from Sir Timothy Shelley. Disappointed and annoyed, Trelawny turned to another biography which none could prohibit—his own. In March 1829 he tells Mrs. Shelley, ‘I am actually writing my own life.’ It was seen as it progressed, he adds, by Armitage Brown and Landor, the latter of whom had already introduced him and his Greek wife into one of his ‘Ima-
