SOURCE: “Trelawny Interpreted” in Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly Appreciative of English Authors and Books, Harper and Brothers, 1932, pp. 240-45.

In the essay that follows, Blunden discusses the “hallucinatory” quality of Trelawny's autobiographical writings, in the absence of detailed independent information about his life.

Trelawny insisted, while he was writing The Adventures of a Younger Son, that he was only recording his own life; fifty years later he was still pleased to assert the truthfulness of that romantic tale; and a biographer of the gentleman corsair who almost seemed able to outwit death itself is under the amusing necessity of at least consulting the book for his earlier facts. Apart from the novel, hardly anything is positively known of Trelawny's career previous to his centripetal arrival in the circle of Shelley and Byron. Mr. Massingham, who has turned aside from Downland Man, from Restoration verse and from bird sanctuaries...