I thought better to push my publication on account of the woeful dulling of the times in this country, where political strife engrosses the mind of every person so much that arts and sciences are, as it were, put on the shelves. Ministers are beings of six weeks lives now-a-days. The Reformers are struggling against the Tories, and vice versa. The Churchmen are aghast at the prospect of the future, and all this puts a complete stoppage to business, independent of such matters. Even since my return to England I have obtained only two or three subscribers, and have lost more than a dozen; nay, I may safely say, two dozen. In America, on the contrary, things appear to go on more prosperously. May God's will grant a long continuation of this to our _only Land_ of Liberty. France, you will have heard, has at last passed an order for the payment of her debts to the citizens of the United States, and I hope that this may prove amply sufficient to save us from having a war with that powerful nation.... I wrote you that Dr. George Parkman, of Boston, would have my 2d. volume of Biographies reprinted in his city. I have seen 100 pages of this reprint here, but do not know if the Vol. (American Ed.) has appeared before the Public? My—Friends—erton, Ord & Co. keep up their curious animadversions against me still—methinks they must be shockingly mortified at my stubborn silence toward them. Some unknown friends now & then reply to their absurdities. His persistent heckler, Charles Waterton, was quite busy at this time, four articles having been directed against Audubon or his friends in 1835, though this was not his most prolific year. A similar reference occurs in a letter written to Bachman from Edinburgh on the 20th of July: "As to the rage of Mr. Waterton, or the lucubrations of Mr. Neal, who by the bye is a subscriber to the Birds of America (bona fide), I really care not a fig—all such stuffs will soon evaporate, being mere smoke from a Dung Hill." In the summer of 1835 Audubon was again established in Edinburgh and working with unremitting vigor at his _Biography_; some idea of the speed which he maintained when able to devote himself unreservedly to this task can be gathered from the fact that after the issue of his second volume, of 620 large pages, in December, 1834, the third, of 654 pages, was published in just a year from that time. He wrote to Edward Harris from Edinburgh on the 5th of July, when engaged in this work: I intend to write a few ["Episodes"] of such extraordinary men, now deceased, with whom I have been acquainted—Thomas Bewick, and Baron Cuvier, for example.