orfu, were securities. But this
was the result of much litigation, causing Trelawny annoyance and
angering him to the last degree.

In the autumn of 1828 he visited England, but returned to the Continent
in the spring of the following year, feeling out of his element at home.
"To whom am I a neighbour?" he wrote, "and near whom? I dwell amongst
tame and civilized human beings with somewhat the same feelings as we
may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wildness, he is
tortured into domestic intercourse with what Shakespeare calls 'forked
animals,' the most abhorrent to his nature." He rambled about; set up a
harem in Athens, bought a Moorish girl to be his concubine, wrote his
_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and sent the MS. in 1830 to Mrs. Shelley,
and it was published in three volumes in 1831, with some excisions of
grossness and licentiousness, which the publisher insisted on having
removed. As already said, no reliance can be placed on this
autobiography as a narrative of the facts of his life, except only of
his boyhood, for, as Lord Byron said of Trelawny, "he could not speak
the truth even if he wished to do so."

When the book appeared, the _Athenaeum_ considered the hero--Trelawny
himself--"a kind of ruffian from his birth," as he had painted himself,
leaving out the villainies and brutalities of which he had been guilty.

He was thrice married, and behaved badly to all three wives. He could
not be faithful and generous even to his friends. With Byron he had
been most intimate, yet when Byron died he wrote to Mary Shelley: "It
is well for his name, and better for Greece, that Byron is dead.... I
now feel my face burn with shame that so weak and ignoble a soul could
so long have influenced me. It is a degrading reflection, and ever
will be. I wish he had lived a little longer, that he might have
witnessed how I would have soared above him here, how I would have
triumphed over his mean spirit." Trelawny soaring!--as a vulture only
in quest of carrion.

And when, in 1858, he published his _Recoll