From her eternal palace, from the heavens, One day descended to America, When in its worst affliction, the great Mary, Its sorrows to maternally console. Behold in Tepeyac how watchfully She frustrates the designs of heresy, How she extinguishes the fire that flames From the far French unto the Indian soil! What matter, then, if proud Napoleon, With his infernal hosts the world appalling, Seeks to possess the land of Mexico? To arms, countrymen: war, war! For the sacred palladium of Guadalupe Protects our native land. The deity of peace have painters skilled Portrayed with bounteous grace and elegance, Painting a virgin who with fair white hands An offering of tender blossoms bore. Thus were their pencils' finest excellences A promise and foreshadowing of this, The image of Our Lady, which in heaven Received its colors. Thus beheld it he, The fortunate Indian, at Tepeyac, That bare and desolate hill, a miracle, That unto day has been perpetuate. Now while the world's ablaze with lively war, Seems that affrighted peace has taken refuge Within the happy households of our land. How sadly, how oddly, sounds in modern ears this felicitation of a poet that peace, which has left the greater part of the world, has taken refuge in Mexico! Evidently our Fray Navarrete did not foresee the results of the war begun by the clerical revolutionist Hidalgo. But whatever may have been the political bias of this religious writer, he retains the esteem of his countrymen as one of the fathers of their fragmentary literature. Our last witness is Miguel Cabrera, the great Mexican painter, whose merits have with reason been compared by an Italian traveller, the Count Beltrami, to those of Correggio and Murillo. Altogether, as carver, architect, and painter, the New World has not produced the equal in art of this extraordinary man, who wrought almost without masters or models, without emulation or fitting aid and recompense, and whose worth has yet to be made well known to the continent which he honored. But our object now is to lend the weight of this preface to the following statement of the Mexican writer, Señor Orozco y Berra: