TO EUROPE AND SUCCESS 353 
in birds had made him in his younger days an amateur 
collector and student. Seldom has the réle of Mzcenas 
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 turied 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 * and Adam Hodgson, who introduced 
*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 
