AUDUBON IN LONDON 397 
however, that you beat me all to pieces in that art.” 
The first winter in London dragged heavily for the 
naturalist, who exclaimed in January, 1828: “How 
long am I to be confined in this immense jail”; when 
Daniel Lizars reported from Edinburgh the loss of four 
of his subscribers, he writes, “I am dull as a beetle. 
Why do I dislike London? Is it because the constant 
evidence of the contrast between the rich and the poor 
is a constant torment to me, or is it because of its size 
and crowd? I know not, but I long for sights and 
sounds of a different nature,” such, we might add, as 
the flocks of wild duck which were occasionally seen 
from Regent’s Park as they passed over the city and 
made him more homesick than ever. Audubon 
hated the city quite as cordially as Charles Lamb ever 
affected to detest the country, and when leaving it, 
afoot or by stage, it seemed as if he could never be 
rid of it. “What a place is London,” he would say, but 
naively add: “many persons live there solely because 
they like it.” 
On February 4, 1828, Audubon was elected to mem- 
bership in the Linnean Society, and in November he 
presented it with a copy of his work, which was then 
well under way. This was noticed in a letter to Swain- 
son, written on November 7, when no acknowledgment 
of the gift had then been received; and he mentioned 
also the sale of his picture of “Blue Jays” for ten 
guineas. At a meeting of the Linnzan Society not 
long after his election, copies of Selby’s Illustrations, of 
British Ornithology and of his own work were placed 
side by side for inspection, and “very unfair compari- 
sons were drawn between the two”; had Selby, Audu- 
bon reflected, been given “the same opportunities that 
my curious life has granted me, his work would have 
