shadow like the once famous scouts that accompanied Fremont into the West.
He is, to be sure, difficult to fix for an adequate portrait, because in his time he played several parts; and he himself was never quite sure in which of his various costumes and poses he would most adorn the national gallery. An emigrant from the Middle Border, a gold-hunter of the Far West, an Indian fighter, a frontier judge, he first rose above the horizon, in 1871, with assistance and cheers from England, as the long-haired, top-booted "poet of the Sierras." Even at the outset of his career, he was not quite satisfied with that rôle. His own early aspiration was rather to be known as "the American Byron;" and, in keeping with that high calling, he shook off the dust of his native land, wandered for a time in "exile," and bore through Italy and the Aegean Isles the pageant of his bleeding heart. Following his personal contact with the Pre-Raphaelites in London, this impressionable mountaineer of the new world discipled himself for a brief period in the early 'seventies to Swinburne and the Rossettis, was intensely "æsthetic," and contemplated devoting himself to the Orient. Returning to America about 1875, he made through his middle years numerous ventures in prose fiction and drama, ranging all the way from the Forty-Niners and the Indians of the Pacific slope to fast life in New York and to the more or less autobio-
