Sir John Trelawny wrote a letter to the Times of
Monday- which seems to make the account of the death of Shelley recently given out highly probable, in spite of the ridicule which has been cast on it. He was himself with Byron and Shelley at the time, and he declares that Byron's boat, which had money on board, was to have left the harbour along with Shelley's, but that it was detained at the last moment for a port-clear- ance. Shelley's boat went out, but the two were very like each other, and various feluccas followed Shelley's boat out. After the squall, Sir John Trelawny was looking anxiously for Shelley's return, when a felucca came in, the crew of which said they could give no news of Shelley's boat, yet it turned out -that they had on board spars and oars of Shelley's boat. Also the boat, when at last it was discovered, had a great hole in her starboard quarter, just such as would have been given by the sharp prow of a felucca. Certainly all this agrees closely with the man's confession, and a lady who is now at Rome, but who was at Spezzia in May, writes to Tuesday's Times to detail what she heard on the spot from a Spezzian lady, to whom the story had long been known. The fisherman who confessed died, she says, in 1863, and made no particular secret of his remorse on his death-bed. On the whole, we fear that the sad story is true, and that it was really- a petty attempt at robbery which deprived England of the maturity of one of the very. greatest of her,poete.
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