18 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
In 1868 there appeared in England a work of com- 
bined and confused authorship, commonly referred to 
as “Buchanan’s Life of Audubon,” the “sub-editor,” as 
he called himself, having since become better known as 
an original, skilled and prolific writer of verse, drama, 
fiction and literary criticism. At that time Robert 
Buchanan was twenty-six years old, and had published 
five volumes of poems in rapid succession, some of which 
had been received with favor by the public. A second 
and third edition of this Life followed in 1869. Finally 
the work was resurrected and again sent to press, unre- 
vised, in 1912, when it appeared in “Everyman’s 
Library,” at a shilling a copy, with an introduction 
which had served as a review of the work in 1869. 
A recent biographer of Alexander Wilson speaks of 
Buchanan as “commissioned by Mrs. Audubon to write 
her husband’s life,” but the lady herself, as well as 
Buchanan, has told a different story. It seems that in 
about the year 1866, Mrs. Audubon prepared, “with the 
aid of a friend,” an extended memoir of her husband, 
which was offered to an American publisher but with- 
out success. The “friend,” at whose home Mrs. Audu- 
bon was then living, was the Rev. Charles Coffin 
Adams,"* rector of St. Mary’s Church, Manhattanville, 
now 135th, Street, New York. The Adams manuscript, 
which consisted chiefly of a transcript from the natural- 
ist’s Journals, then in possession of his wife, was com- 
pleted presumably in 1867. In the summer of that year 
it was placed in the hands of the London publishers, 
“Rev. Dr. Adams was rector of this parish for twenty-five years, from 
1863 to his death in February, 1888; he was the author of three volumes on 
religious subjects and various smaller tracts; from 1855 to 1863 he had 
charge of a church in Baltimore, Maryland, and while there published 
an anonymous pamphlet entitled “Slavery by a Marylander; Its Institu- 
tion and Origin; Its Status Under the Law and Under the Gospel” 
(8 pp. 8vo. Baltimore, 1860). 
