22 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
haps the best key to the sad history of this able writer 
was given by himself when he said: “It is my vice that 
I must love a thing wholly, or dislike it wholly.” His 
wife, we are told, was much like himself, and “like a 
couple of babies they muddled through life, tasting of 
some of its joys, but oftener of its sorrows.” Undoubt- 
edly Robert Buchanan was a genuine lover of truth and 
beauty; he has written numerous sketches of birds and 
outdoor scenes, but with no suggestion of nature as 
serving any other purpose than that of supplying a poet 
with bright and pleasing images. 
It was with the purpose of correcting the false im- 
pressions created by animadversions in Buchanan’s Life 
that Mrs. Audubon, with the aid of her friend, James 
Grant Wilson, revised this work and published it in 
America under her name as editor, in 1869. ‘The 
changes then made in Buchanan’s text, however, were 
of a minor character and most of its errors remained 
uncorrected. The naturalist’s granddaughter, Miss 
Maria R. Audubon, was inspired in part by similar feel- 
ings in preparing, with the aid of Dr. Elliott Coues, her 
larger and excellent work in two volumes, entitled 
Audubon, and His Journals, which appeared in 1898. 
To her all admirers of Audubon owe a debt of gratitude 
for giving to the world for the first time a large part 
of his extant journals, as well as many new facts bear- 
ing upon his life and character. Other briefer biogra- 
phies of Audubon which have appeared have been taken 
so completely from the preceding works, and have re- 
peated and extended their errors to such an extent, as to 
call for little or no comment either here or in the pages 
which follow. 
Through the discovery in France of new document- 
ary evidence in surprising abundance we-are obliged to 
