TO EUROPE AND SUCCESS 359 



seizing a tiger swallowtail butterfly on a branch of the 

 paw-paw tree, were finished by December 10; the first 

 number of five plates was ready some weeks later. Li- 

 zars engraved at Edinburgh the first ten of Audubon's 

 plates, but most of these were subsequently retouched, 

 colored and reissued by his successor in London, as will 

 presently appear. 



When Audubon's pictures were exhibited at the 

 Royal Institution of Edinburgh, their success was imme- 

 diate, and like the appearance of a new Waverley novel, 

 they became the talk of the town ; the American woods- 

 man had provided a new thrill for the leaders of fash- 

 ion, as well as for the literati and the scientific men. 

 The "noblest Roman of them all," Sir Walter Scott, 

 refused to attend, but after having met the naturalist 

 he wrote this in his journal: "I wish I had gone to see 

 his drawings ; but I had heard so much about them that 

 I resolved not to see them — 'a crazy way of mine, your 

 honor.' " 



Philarete-Chasles, a well known French critic of the 

 period, has left the following record " of the effect 

 which this exhibition made on his impressionable mind: 



We have admired in the rooms of the Royal Society of 

 Edinburgh the public exhibition of [Audubon's] original water- 

 color drawings. A magic power transported us into the for- 

 ests which for so many years this man of genius has trod. 



swallowtail" in this plate was possibly added for effect, for few of our 

 birds, which habitually hunt moths, ever prey upon butterflies. I have 

 seen the cabbage butterfly and a few of the smaller kinds brought to 

 the nests of the Chebec and Wood Pewee but never a "monarch" or 

 "papilio"; yet some affirm that the Kingbird will attack the "monarch." 



"Translated from Etudes sur la Litterature et les Moeurs des Anglo- 

 Americains au XIXe siecJe, "Audubon," pp. 66-106 (Paris, 1851). 

 Philarete-Chasles, who wrote chiefly on American, English and European 

 authors and books, has seventy volumes credited to him in the National 

 Library at Paris. 



