Shelley's association with Byron, of whom, in 'Julian and Maddalo' (1818), he has drawn a picture with the darker features left out, brought as much pain as pleasure to all concerned.No doubt Byron's splenetic cynicism, even his parade of debauchery, was largely an assumption for the benefit of the world; but beneath the frankness, the cheerfulness, the wit of his intimate conversation, beneath his careful cultivation of the graces of a Regency buck, he was fundamentally selfish and treacherous.Provided no serious demands were made upon him, he enjoyed the society of Shelley and his circle, and the two were much together, both at Venice and in the Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa, where, with a menagerie of animals and retainers, Byron had installed himself in those surroundings of Oriental ostentation which it amused him to affect.
A more unalloyed friendship was that with the amiable Gisborne family, settled at Leghorn; its serene cheerfulness is reflected in Shelley's charming rhymed 'Letter to Maria Gisborne'.And early in 1821 they were 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 e'citing 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 chaste moon." The old sea-captain in Sir John Millais'
picture, "The North-West Passage," now in the Tate Gallery in London, is a portrait of Trelawny in old age.
