In reply to that gentleman (G. Ord, Esq.), regarding the assistance it was expected I should have given my friend, Mr. Audubon, in the _scientific_ details of his work, my reply was, that the negotiation had been broken off from an unwillingness that my name should be printed on the title-page. I was not asked to write the work, nor did Mr. Audubon "insist upon his own name being given to the world as the author" of such parts as he wished me to undertake.... I have read Mr. Audubon's original manuscripts, and I have read Mr. Waterton's original manuscripts. I think the English of one is as good as the English of the other—but here the comparison ends." The controversy thus started did not reflect much credit on Audubon's detractors, but reverberations of the charge were heard at a much later day. Robert Bakewell, the geologist, who was a relative of Mrs. Audubon, then living at Hampstead, entered this controversy, and in June, 1833, replied[84] to one of Waterton's fulminations, which he attributed to envy and jealousy, saying that posterity would regard Audubon as "the most distinguished ornithologist of the present age." Charles Waterton began his travels at eighteen, but early settled down to a life of leisurely independence on his ancestral estate in Yorkshire, where he studied birds to little purpose and wrote extensively on natural-history subjects; he is best known for his _Wanderings_,[85] which has passed through numerous editions and is still read. From youth Waterton enjoyed exceptional advantages, and according to one of his biographers, "lived to extreme old age without having wasted an hour or a shilling." He was the twenty-seventh "lord of Walton Hall," the manor house of the family, which stood on an island in a lake; the estate of 260 acres was mainly converted into a preserve for wild birds. His young wife died in 1829, after having given birth to a son, and he lived on his paternal acres in semi-retirement ever after. It was said that Waterton would never don evening clothes or a black coat, but insisted on wearing a blue frock with gold buttons until an anxious policeman in the neighboring village of Wakefield persuaded him to make a change; he told the Reverend J. G. Wood in 1863 that he had been bled 160 times, mostly by his own hand. When, in his sixty-ninth year, he had the misfortune to fall from a pear tree and break an elbow joint, the first remedy tried was the extraction of thirty ounces of blood; shortly after this a careless servant withdrew a chair as he was seating himself at table, and thirty more ounces were immediately required. The wage of one of his laborers is said to have sufficed for his personal needs, and his sleeping apartment had neither bed, chair, nor carpet; he lay on bare boards, wrapped in a blanket, with an oaken block for pillow; and he is said to have never tasted fermented liquor and to have eaten but sparingly of meat.