SOURCE: “Life and Letters (1822-1847)” in The Friend of Shelley: A Memoir of Edward John Trelawny, Cobden-Sanderson, 1930, pp. 221-88.

In the following excerpt, Massingham characterizes Trelawny's letters as deeply inscribed by his short friendship with Shelley, although most of the letters date from the sixty-year period of Trelawny's life after Shelley's death in 1822.

Trelawny's inner life pivots upon Shelley as integrally as the ocean tides take their motions from the moon. There is no doubt that he saw in Shelley the perfect man he wished to have been himself, had he not had poured into his composition something of the foreign matter of Byron the sensationalist, Byron of the dual part, at civil war with himself until he tried to make peace in a country equally divided against itself. Trelawny hated Byron because he saw the face-value of what he wished to appear before the world, though he...