Throng down to the wharves to see the
Golden Era or the Cornelius's Coffin, or whatever other mail-steamer may
bring these words to your longing eyes. Open to the right and left as
Adams's express-messenger carries the earliest copy of the "Atlantic
Monthly," sealed with the reddest wax, tied with the reddest tape, from
the Corner Store direct to him who was once the life and light of the
Corner Store, who now studies eschscholtzias through a telescope
thirty-eight miles away on Monte Diablo! Rush upon the newsboy who then
brings forth the bale of this Journal for the Multitude, to find that
the Queen of California of whom we write is no modern queen, but that
she reigned some five hundred and fifty-five years ago. Her precise
contemporaries were Amadis of Gaul, the Emperor Esplandian, and the
Sultan Radiaro. And she _flourished_, as the books say, at the time when
this Sultan made his unsuccessful attack on the city of
Constantinople,--all of which she saw, part of which she was.

She was not _petite_, nor blond, nor golden-haired. She was large and
black as the ace of clubs. But the prejudice of color did not then exist
even among the most brazen-faced or the most copper-headed. For, as you
shall learn, she was reputed the most beautiful of women; and it was
she, O Californians, who wedded the gallant prince Talanque,--your
first-known king. The supporters of the arms of the beautiful shield of
the State of California should be, on the right, a knight armed
_cap-a-pie_, and, on the left, an Amazon sable, clothed in skins, as you
shall now see.

Mr. E. E. Hale, of Boston, sent to the Antiquarian Society last year a
paper which shows that the name of California was known to literature
before it was given to our peninsula by Cortes. Cortes discovered the
peninsula in 1535, and seems to have called it California then. But Mr.
Hale shows that twenty-five years before that time, in a romance called
the "Deeds of Esplandian," the name of California was given to an island
"on the right hand of the Indies." This romance was a sequel, or fifth
book, to the celebrated romance of "Amadis of Gaul." Such books made the
principal reading of the young blades of that day who could read at all.
It seems clear enough, that Cortes and his friends, coming to the point
farthest to the west then known,--which all of them, from Columbus down,
supposed to be in the East Indies,--gave to their discovery the name,
familiar to romantic adventu