TO EUROPE AND SUCCESS 353 



in birds had made him in his younger days an amateur 

 collector and student. Seldom has the role of Maecenas 

 been played more effectively and with less ostentation 

 than by those intelligent men of affairs, to whom Audu- 

 bon, with his fine enthusiasm and bold literary plans, 

 seemed to embody all the romance of the New World. 

 They stood sponsor for his work and worth, and did 

 all in their power to make their new discovery known. 

 At the home of the senior Rathbone, called "Green- 

 bank," three miles out of Liverpool, the naturalist was 

 warmly welcomed, and his excellent hostess, Mrs. Wil- 

 liam Rathbone, the "Queen bee," as he called her, re- 

 ceived from him lessons in drawing and became his first 

 subscriber. 



At this period Audubon often complained of shy- 

 ness felt in meeting strangers, but his "observatory 

 nerves," as he said, never gave way. He studied his 

 English friends as closely as he had the birds of Amer- 

 ica, and the results of his shrewd observations were 

 often turned to practical account. That he was as diffi- 

 dent as he declared himself to be may be doubted, for 

 he seems to have met nearly everyone of prominence 

 wherever he went, and a list of his acquaintance at the 

 end of his sojourn abroad would read much like a "Blue 

 Book" of the British Isles. 



At Liverpool Audubon received much assistance 

 also from Edward Roscoe, botanist and writer, Dr. 

 Thomas S. Traill 4 and Adam Hodgson, who introduced 



4 Dr. Thomas Stuart Traill, after whom one of our common flycatchers 

 was named, was a founder of the Royal Institution at Liverpool, and later 

 a professor of medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh. When the keepership 

 of the Department of Natural History in the British Museum became 

 vacant through the resignation of Dr. Leech in 1822, Dr. Traill supported 

 William Swainson for the position; when George J. Children received the 

 appointment, he was disinclined to accept defeat, and entered upon a 

 crusade against the Museum's trustees in a series of anonymous articles 



