In 1880 he transferred to the more lucrative consulship of Glasgow, and ROBIN GRAY, a tale of Scottish life, is the product of his stay there.

In 1885 he was dismissed from his consulship, probably for political reasons, though neglect of duty was charged against him.
He removed to London where he remained, for most part, until his death.
Bret Harte never really knew the life of the mining camp.

His mining experiences were too fragmentary, and consequently his portraits of mining life are wholly impressionistic.

"No one," Mark Twain wrote, "can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse." Yet, Twain added elsewhere, "Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive." That is, perhaps, the final comment.
Much could be urged against Harte's stories: the glamor they throw over the life they depict is largely fictitious; their pathetic endings are obviously stylized; their technique is overwhelmingly derivative.
Nevertheless, so excellent a critic as Chesterton maintained that "There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons which we could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte." The figure is perhaps exaggerated, but there are many reasons for admiration.

First, Harte originated a new and incalculably influential type of story: the romantically picturesque "human-interest" story.