Books: Childe Edward

TRELAWNY—Margaret Armstrong—Macmillan ($3).

Edward Trelawny knew Shelley some six months, Byron two years, but he wrote (30 years later) the most colorful firsthand report of their strange doings—Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Last fortnight Margaret Armstrong (Fanny Kemble) reported the even stranger doings of Edward Trelawny, showed him to have been more Byronic than Byron.

Born in 1792, Edward Trelawny, like all the Romantics, was a spiritual child of the Great French Revolution. When (age 9) he beat up a schoolmaster, his father signed him up for a trick in...