INTRODUCTION 19 



Messrs. Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, who without 

 any authority turned it over to one of their hard-pressed, 

 pot-boiling retainers, Robert Buchanan, poet and young 

 man of genius. Buchanan boiled down the original 

 manuscript, as he said, to one-fifth of its original com- 

 pass, cutting out what he regarded as prolix or unnec- 

 essary and connecting "the whole with some sort of a 

 running narrative." 12 Mrs. Audubon was unable to 

 recover her property from either publishers or editor 

 or to obtain any satisfaction for its unwarranted use. 

 Whatever defects the Adams memoir may have pos- 

 sessed, this is much to be regretted, since, as her grand- 

 daughter has said, Mrs. Audubon had at her command 

 many valuable documents, the originals of which have 

 since been destroyed. 



Buchanan, like Audubon, had been reared in com- 

 parative luxury, "the spoiled darling of a loving 

 mother." After the failure of his father in various news- 

 paper enterprises about four years before this time, he 

 had gone up to London with but few shillings in his 

 pocket and had begun life there literally in a garret. 

 The reflection that Audubon had fought a similar but 

 much harder battle in that same London thirty years 

 before, and won, should possibly have awakened in him 

 a somewhat friendlier spirit than was then displayed. 

 It must be admitted, however, that Buchanan produced 

 a very readable story, although there was not a word 

 in his whole book which showed any real sympathy with 



13 Buchanan said that the manuscript submitted to him was inordinately 

 long and needed careful revision; he added that "while he could not fail 

 to express his admiration for the affectionate spirit and intelligent sym- 

 pathy with which the friendly editor discharged his task, he was bound 

 to say that his literary experience was limited." After copying a passage 

 from one of Audubon's journals, this editor had the unfortunate habit 

 of drawing his pen through the original; in this way hundreds of pages of 

 Audubon's admirable "copper-plate" were irretrievably defaced. 



