[306] Edward Harris was born at Morristown, New Jersey, in 1799, where he died in 1863. Without the incentive to earn money or the ambition to acquire fame, he lived the life of a gentleman of leisure, devoted to natural history, to sport and to the cultivation of his paternal acres. He had the gift of friendship, was widely traveled, wrote charming letters, and kept careful records of his observations, but rarely published anything. The breeding of fine stock was one of his hobbies, and as a result of a journey to Europe in 1839, when he visited a horse fair in Normandy, he is credited with having first introduced the Norman breed into America. "The beneficent results of his quiet, unobtrusive life," says an appreciative biographer, "reach down to our time, and, after half a century, we are glad that Edward Harris lived." See biographical sketch by George Spencer Morris, in Cassinia, vol. vi (Philadelphia, 1902).
[307] See [Chapter XII, p. 179].
[308] Written by Dr. Edmund Porter of Frenchtown, New Jersey, to Dr. Thomas Miner of Haddam, Connecticut, on October 25, 1825. See Witmer Stone, "Some Philadelphia Ornithological Collections and Collectors, 1784-1850," The Auk, vol. xvi (New York, 1899).
[309] Thomas Sully (1783-1872), Englishman by birth, who had come to America at an early age, and like Audubon had waged a bitter struggle before success was achieved, became one of the first portrait painters of the early American School.
In 1831 Sully wrote to Audubon that his success in England and France had charmed all of his friends in America, that it was like a personal triumph to them, and that it would soon silence his few remaining enemies; "Be true to yourself, Audubon," he added, "and never doubt of success." It has been said that when Audubon first came to Philadelphia in 1824 he applied to Sully for instruction, saying that he wished to become a portrait painter (see Dunlap, op. cit.); again that he was ready to sell his drawings to the highest bidder; but the records of his journals from 1820 onward are sufficiently consistent to show what his purpose really was.
[310] For the favor of examining a collection of interesting autograph letters written to Audubon in Europe and America, some of which are here reproduced, I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. Henry R. Howland, secretary of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences. This note was written on a narrow strip of manila-colored drawing paper.
[311] See [Chapter XI].
[312] See [Bibliography, Nos. 15] and [16].
[313] See Lucy Audubon, ed., Life of John James Audubon, the Naturalist ([Bibl. No. 73]), p. 107.
[314] See [Vol. I, p. 219].