joined by a young couple who proved very congenial. Ned Williams was a
half-pay lieutenant of dragoons, with literary and artistic tastes, and
his wife, Jane, had a sweet, engaging manner, and a good singing voice.
Then there was the exciting discovery of the Countess Emilia Viviani,
imprisoned in a convent by a jealous step-mother. All three of
them--Mary, Claire, and Shelley--at once fell in love with the dusky
beauty. Impassioned letters passed between her and Shelley, in which he
was her "dear brother" and she his "dearest sister"; but she was soon
found to be a very ordinary creature, and is only remembered as the
instrument chosen by chance to inspire 'Epipsychidion'. Finally there
appeared, in January 1822, the truest-hearted and the most lovable
of all Shelley's friends. Edward John Trelawny, a cadet of a
Cornish family, "with his knight-errant aspect, dark, handsome, and
moustachioed," was the true buccaneer of romance, but of honest English
grain, and without a trace of pose. The devotion with which, though he
only knew Shelley for a few months, he fed in memory on their friendship
to the last day of his life, brings home to us, as nothing else can, the
force of Shelley's personal attraction; for this man lived until 1881,
an almost solitary survivor from the Byronic age, and his life contained
matter enough to swamp recollection of half-a-dozen poets. It seems
that, after serving in the navy and deserting from an East Indiaman at
Bombay, he passed, in the Eastern Archipelago, through the incredible
experiences narrated in his 'Adventures of a Younger Son'; and all this
before he was twenty-one, for in 1813 he was in England and married.
Then he disappeared, bored by civilisation; nothing is known of him
until 1820, when he turns up in Switzerland in pursuit of sport and
adventure. After Shelley's death he went to Greece with Byron, joined
the rebel chief Odysseus, married his sister Tersitza, and was nearly
killed in defending a cave on Mount Parnassus. Through the subsequent
years, which included wanderings in America, and a narrow escape from
drowning in trying to swim Niagara, he kept pressing Shelley's widow to
marry him. Perhaps because he was piqued by Mary's refusal, he has left
a rather unflattering portrait of her. He was indignant at her desire
to suppress parts of 'Queen Mab'; but he might have admired the honesty
with which she retained 'Epipsychidion', although that poem describes
her as a "cold