When Audubon's pictures were exhibited at the Royal Institution of Edinburgh, their success was immediate, and like the appearance of a new Waverley novel, they became the talk of the town; the American woodsman had provided a new thrill for the leaders of fashion, as well as for the literati and the scientific men. The "noblest Roman of them all," Sir Walter Scott, refused to attend, but after having met the naturalist he wrote this in his journal: "I wish I had gone to see his drawings; but I had heard so much about them that I resolved not to see them—'a crazy way of mine, your honor.'" Philarète-Chasles, a well known French critic of the period, has left the following record[330] of the effect which this exhibition made on his impressionable mind: We have admired in the rooms of the Royal Society of Edinburgh the public exhibition of [Audubon's] original watercolor drawings. A magic power transported us into the forests which for so many years this man of genius has trod. Learned and ignorant alike were astonished at the spectacle, which we will not attempt to reproduce. Imagine a landscape wholly American, trees, flowers, grass, even the tints of the sky and the waters, quickened with a life that is real, peculiar, trans-Atlantic. On twigs, branches, bits of shore, copied by the brush with the strictest fidelity, sport the feathered races of the New World, in the size of life, each in its particular attitude, its individuality and peculiarities. Their plumages sparkle with nature's own tints; you see them in motion or at rest, in their plays and their combats, in their anger fits and their caresses, singing, running, asleep, just awakened, beating the air, skimming the waves, or rending one another in their battles. It is a real and palpable vision of the New World, with its atmosphere, its imposing vegetation, and its tribes which know not the yoke of man. The sun shines athwart the clearing in the woods; the swan floats suspended between a cloudless sky and a glittering wave; strange and majestic figures keep pace with the sun, which gleams from the mica sown broadcast on the shores of the Atlantic; and this realization of an entire hemisphere, this picture of a nature so lusty and strong, is due to the brush of a single man; such an unheard of triumph of patience and genius!—the resultant rather of a thousand triumphs won in the face of innumerable obstacles!" Another French writer[331] remarked that Audubon produced the same sensation among the savants of England that Franklin had made at the close of the eighteenth century among the politicians of the Old World; his works, he added, should be translated into his native tongue, and produced in a form which would enable them to reach the library of every naturalist in France.