Before Audubon left New Orleans, an old acquaintance, Mr. Vincent Nolte[322] of that city, had also furnished him with credentials, in which it was stated that the naturalist was carrying with him four hundred original drawings, and that his object was "to find a purchaser or a publisher." "He has a crowd of letters," continued Nolte, "from Mr. Clay, De Witt Clinton, and others for England, which will do much for him; but your introduction to Mr. Roscoe and others will do more." This judgment was sound, but the most valuable letter which Audubon carried proved to be that of Nolte himself addressed to Richard Rathbone, Esq., of Liverpool, for it brought him into immediate friendly relations with an influential family of merchants which also included William Rathbone, a brother, as well as their father, William Rathbone, Senior, whose interest in birds had made him in his younger days an amateur collector and student. Seldom has the rôle of Mæcenas been played more effectively and with less ostentation than by those intelligent men of affairs, to whom Audubon, 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 "Greenbank," three miles out of Liverpool, the naturalist was warmly welcomed, and his excellent hostess, Mrs. William Rathbone, the "Queen bee," as he called her, received from him lessons in drawing and became his first subscriber.
At this period Audubon often complained of shyness 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 America, and the results of his shrewd observations were often turned to practical account. That he was as diffident 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[323] and Adam Hodgson, who introduced him to Lord Stanley. When he came to write his Ornithological Biography, these early friends were all publicly called by name, and we thus had (though, as it afterwards appeared, in name only) the "Rathbone Warbler,"[324] "Stanley Hawk," "Children's Warbler," "Cuvier's Regulus," "Roscoe's Yellow-throat," "Selby's Flycatcher," and still possess "Bewick's Wren," "Traill's Flycatcher," "Henslow's Bunting,"[325] "MacGillivray's Finch," and "Harlan's Hawk," to cite a few instances of this form of acknowledgment.
Within barely a week after landing at Liverpool a total stranger, Audubon was invited to show his drawings at the Royal Institution. The exhibition, which lasted a month, was a surprising success; 413 persons, as he recorded, were admitted on the second day, and it netted him one hundred pounds although no charge for admission was made during the first week.
Everyone, said the naturalist, was surprised at his appearance, for he wore his hair long, dressed in unfashionable clothes, rose early, worked late, and was abstemious in food and drink. Shortly after his arrival, his sister-in-law, Mrs. Alexander Gordon, urged him to have his hair cut and to buy a fashionable coat, but he could not then bear to sacrifice his ambrosial locks, which continued to wave over his shoulders until the following March. If we can accept Sir Walter Besant's characterization of the period, the "long-haired Achæan" was no stranger to the streets of London as late as 1837: "brave is the exhibition of flowing locks; they flow over the ears and over the coat-collars; you can smell the bear's grease across the street; and if these amaranthine locks were to be raised you would see the shiny coating of bear's grease upon the velvet collar below."
Audubon had not been in England three weeks before he resumed his drawing and painting habits, at first in order to repay his friends for their kindness, and later as a means of support; at times he would devote every spare moment to this work, and he was then able to paint fourteen hours at a stretch without fatigue. On October 2 he recorded that he had made in less than twenty minutes a diminutive sketch of the Turkey Cock from his large twenty-three hour picture. This was for Mrs. William Rathbone, Senior, who later presented it to him in the form of a handsome gold-mounted seal, inscribed with his favorite motto, "America, my country."[326] The facility which Audubon displayed in producing his pictures of animal life—American wild turkeys, trapped otters, fighting cats, English game pieces, and the like, in a style both novel and individual, added much to his immediate popularity in England, as it later did to his purse. His painting devices are thus referred to in a journal entry for January, 1827:
No one, I think, paints in my method; I, who have never studied but by piece-meal, form my pictures according to my ways of study. For instance, I am now working on a Fox; I take one neatly killed, put him up with wires and when satisfied with the truth of the position, I take my palette and work as rapidly as possible; the same with my birds; if practicable I finish the bird at one sitting,—often, it is true, of fourteen hours,—so that I think they are correct, both in detail and composition.
When he was painting pheasants and needed a white one as "a keystone of light" to his picture, a nobleman sent word that he would be given "leave to see the pictures" in his hall, but this Audubon characteristically refused, being determined to pay no such visits without invitation.
On the 10th of September, 1826, Audubon left Liverpool, in a hopeful mood, for Manchester, with the intention of visiting the chief cities of England and Scotland. He was fortified with a bundle of letters to a long list of distinguished people, including Baron von Humboldt, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Humphry Davy and Sir Thomas Lawrence. His first step proved a disappointment, and when he finally left the City of Spindles six weeks later, he found himself poorer than when he had entered it. At Manchester, however, he added to his list of interested friends and possible patrons, and acting upon their suggestion, opened a subscription book for the publication of his long meditated work, to be called The Birds of America. The Rathbones, as well as other friends whose advice he esteemed, tried to dissuade him from the plan of publishing his drawings in their full size, which was that of life, on account of the great expense involved and the enormous bulk such a work would assume; but he could not bring himself to give up the idea, in which he received the support of the London bookseller, Mr. Bohn, who, after seeing Audubon's drawings reversed his opinion, saying that they must be brought out in their full size, and that they would certainly pay.
After coming to England Audubon often thought of the shifting scenes and strange contrasts his life had brought. One day he felt the pinch of poverty, but on the next fared sumptuously at the tables of the rich; now a rambler in the wilds of America, glad to accept the hospitality of the humblest prairie squatter, now the guest of some metropolitan aristocrat. "The squatter," he said, when writing in England, "is rough, true, and hospitable; my friends here polished, true, and generous. Both give freely, and he who during the tough storms of life can be in such spots may well say that he has tasted happiness."