[1] He was a second cousin on both his parents' sides to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), who lived two miles away at Field Place, Warnham, and with whom Medwin formed a friendship from childhood onwards.

[3] After a further year in a public school, Medwin matriculated at University College, Oxford in the winter of 1805, but left without taking his degree.

[2] Medwin showed aptitude in foreign languages and was to become fluent in Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

"[4] Medwin's financial situation could not continue as it was, and by 1812 he had accepted a military commission in the 24th Light Dragoons, a regiment where he could pursue his social pretensions.

[1] Although he had no military training, Medwin was gazetted as a cornet in June 1812, joining his regiment at Cawnpore in Uttar Pradesh in northern India shortly thereafter.

Cawnpore, far removed from the scene of the Gurkha or Nepal War of 1814–16, in which Medwin's regiment did not participate, was amongst the largest military stations in India, with an organised social life and stores stocked with European goods.

He saw action rarely, but was present at the siege of Hathras in 1817 and involved in advances against the Pindaris on the banks of the river Sindh in December 1817.

He enthusiastically toured the classical Hindu temples of Gaur, Palibothra, Jagannath and Karla, and the Elephanta and Ellora Caves.

[1] Whilst waiting in Bombay for a berth back to England in October 1818, he rediscovered on a bookstall the poetry of his cousin Shelley, in a copy of The Revolt of Islam.

[3] Recalling the incident under his persona Julian in The Angler in Wales in 1834, he was "astonished at the greatness of (Shelley's) genius" and declared that "the amiable philosophy and self-sacrifice inculcated by that divine poem, worked a strange reformation in my mind.

Mary couldn't stand Medwin's nagging presence, and found him extremely boring: "The burden of Tom grows very heavy!".

[8] Medwin was periodically ill during his months in Pisa but worked with Shelley on a number of poems and on the publication of his journal Sketches From Hindoostan.

[2] Shelley was working on Prometheus and would read drafts each evening to Medwin, who was continuing with a second volume of Oswald and Edwin, An Oriental Sketch.

It was at Genoa that he heard a rumour of an English schooner being lost with two Englishman aboard, but only on his arrival in Geneva did he learn that it was Shelley and Edward Williams, who had drowned on 8 July 1822.

The restless Medwin moved to Paris in 1824, where he met Washington Irving, an American author who shared his enthusiasm for Byron and the Spanish poets, particularly Calderón.

Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron's mistresses, was deeply upset by Medwin's comments and wrote him letters putting her view of their affair to him.

John Murray (1778–1843), the Scottish publisher whose family house owned the copyright to Byron's works, was also outraged at the revelations and threatened to sue.

Captain Medwin was by then famous (or infamous), well-off, and able to marry Anne Henrietta Hamilton, Countess of Starnford (a Swedish title), on 2 November 1824 in Lausanne.

Genoa, however, turned out to be only an interlude, as Medwin was expelled for writing a tragedy called The Conspiracy of the Fieschi, which alarmed the Genoese authorities, believing it to be anti-government propaganda.

Medwin's skill lay in bringing alive Aeschylus's characters through believable dialogue that uses traditional metres and measure.

[2] As a consequence additional material was added in the form of an appendix, made up of quotations from such works as Jan Swammerdam's Ephemeri vita, a treatise on the mayfly[21] The second volume was padded by a revised version of Medwin's Pidararees now called Julian and Giselle.

The prose he was now producing was essentially that of a traveller, with settings associated with former periods of his life: India, Rome, Switzerland, Paris, Venice, Florence and later Jena, Mannheim and Strasbourg.

He joined the influential Heidelberg museum and participated fully in the city's literary life, reviewing local theatre for English readers.

[27] In the early 1840s Lady Fanny Lindon, John Keats's former fiancée and literary muse, moved to Heidelberg with her husband, and through her Medwin was involved once again in a controversy concerning a dead, but highly influential English Romantic poet.

Medwin and Lady Lindon collaborated to correct the allegation provided by Mary Shelley in her Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) that Keats had become insane in his final days.

[30] Criticism was to be expected and Medwin's biography of Shelley duly received a withering attack in The Athenaeum, which opened its review: "We are not in any way satisfied with this book.

Mary Shelley's reaction was to be expected, given her antipathy towards him, but Trelawny was equally cutting, calling the work "superficial" as late as 1870.

A further book of poetry published in 1862 in Heidelberg was entitled Odds and Ends, with translations from Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Scaliger, and additional poems by Caroline de Crespigny, who died shortly before its publication.

At his request, his grave faces east to India, Italy and Germany, and reads: "He was a friend and companion of Byron, Shelley and Trelawny."

[12] The few writers to highlight Medwin concentrate on his popular writings on Shelley and Byron, but his legacy includes numerous translations from Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Portuguese and Spanish.