Accept our respectful united regards, and offer them to your family, whilst I remain, with highest esteem, your truly thankful friend and most obedient servant, JOHN J. AUDUBON. Wilson had said in his earlier review: We do not believe that till within these few years, he had any practice in composition.... Yet Genius, if from circumstances behindhand in any common accomplishment, soon supplies it—soon makes up its lee-way—or rather, it has only to try to do what it has never done before, and it succeeds in it to admiration. Audubon, who had written but little even in his native tongue—French—under a powerful motive, took to writing English; and he was not long in learning to write it well, not only with fluency, but eloquence, as the fine extracts we have quoted show in unfading colours. The following comment on Audubon's second volume of the _Biography_ appeared in the _Athenæum_ for 1835: If only considered as evidence that it is in the power of man to achieve whatever he _wills_, and that no obstacles are too great to be overcome by energy and devotion of purpose, it would claim our good will and best wishes. He has told what he has seen and undergone, not perhaps in the smooth nicely balanced periods of a drawing-room writer ... but with unstudied freedom, rising at times to eloquence, nor been ashamed to utter the thousand affectionate and benevolent feelings which a close and enthusiastic communion with nature must nourish. The work is full of the man. The winter and spring of 1835 were spent in London, and though suffering from the strain of overwork, Audubon kept doggedly at his tasks. On April 20 he wrote to Bachman: Immediately on my arrival in London I set to writing, and finished in one month, one 4th. of the Biographies of my 3d. vol. This rendering me _puffy_, I could scarcely breathe—my appetite was gone—my digestion bad—in other words I was attacked by Dyspepsia as bad as ever. Then I thought of a change of work—for in change of labour the body and the mind undergo sure and certain relief. I took to Drawing! and what do you think—I have positively finished 33 drawings of American birds in England. This has enabled me to swell my 3d. vol. of Illustrations with 57 species not given by Wilson and therefore forestalling my friend Charles Bonaparte. On the 28th of April Audubon wrote to Edward Harris, begging him to send specimens of certain birds which he needed, as well as a circumstantial account of the shad fisheries of the Delaware River as material for an "Episode" for the third volume of his _Biography_; the fiftieth number of his illustrations was then in the hands of the colorist. He continued:[128]