With this lamentable example before me, I trust
that in the following sketches I have abstained from
any positive moral. I might have painted my villains
of the blackest dye, -- so black, indeed, that the origi-
nals thereof would have contemplated them with the
glow of comparative virtue. I might have made it
impossible for them to have performed a virtuous or
generous action, and have thus avoided that moral
confusion which is apt to arise in the contemplation
of mixed motives and qualities. But I should have
burdened myself with the responsibility of their
creation, which, as a humble writer of romance and
entitled to no particular reverence, I did not care
to do.

I fear I cannot claim, therefore, any higher motive
than to illustrate an era of which Californian history
has preserved the incidents more often than the char-
acter of the actors, -- an era which the panegyrist was
too often content to bridge over with a general com-
pliment to its survivors, -- an era still so recent that in
attempting to revive its poetry, I am conscious also
of awakening the more prosaic recollections of these
same survivors, -- and yet an era replete with a certain
heroic Greek poetry, of which perhaps none were more
unconscious than the heroes themselves. And I shall
be quite content to have collected here merely the
materials for the Iliad that is yet to be sung.

SAN FRANCISCO, December 24, 1869.

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