and all these are utterly destroyed. Of two of them, the very site was unknown until ascertained by modern scholars. Others, less renowned in history, have been more fortunate. Perugia, Cortona, Bolsena, and some others, stand to this day on the very foundations which the Etruscans laid, and occupy the exact surface of the ancient cities. Surrounded with solid walls-exactly covering the crest of the hill on which they rise, with close packed houses, and tortuous declivitous streets-they present the same appearance which they doubtless exhibited in ages long anterior to the Roman conquest. None of the Etruscan cities covered a large surface within the walls. Veii and Tarquinii were from four to six miles in circuit; few of the others exceeded two. But they must doubtless have extended much further in their suburbs, in the flourishing days of the republic, to accommodate the vast population which must have thronged them. For there is abundant evidence that the whole territory between the Tiber, the Arno, and the sea, swarmed with the habitations of men; and that the plains and valleys were cultivated like one vast garden; while the higher ranges were covered with lofty woods, which have long since disappeared. All the tract of undulating plain which borders the Mediterranean, the Campagna of Rome itself, and the dreaded Maremme; the sandy downs, now only clad with scattered cork-trees, and the marshy thickets, haunts of the wild boar; were then crowded with towns, and must have supported a vast multitude of inhabitants. Tarquinii, for instance, stood on the desolate border of the modern Tuscan Maremme; at the very edge of

'Quelle fiere selvagge, che in odio hanno
Fra Cecina e Cornetoi luoghi colti;'

now even wilder and more solitary than in the age of Dante. Yet the Necropolis, or cemetery of that city, as Mrs Gray was informed by Signor Avolta,' was computed to extend over sixteen square miles; and that, judging from the two thousand 'tombs which had of late years been opened, their number in ' all could not be less than two millions!' That is, it contains as many occupants as would be furnished, under average conditions of mortality, by a population of 100,000 in more than six centuries. And yet this vast city of the dead' is surrounded on ' all sides by cemeteries scarcely inferior in extent to itself— Tus'cania, and Vulci, and Montalto, without naming Castel d'Asso, 'which we shall afterwards describe as having probably been the • Westminster Abbey of Central Etruria.' What an idea does this description give at once of the vast population and resources of Etruria, and the duration of her prosperity!

Corn, wine, oil, and cattle were then, as now, the staple products of the land; and the constant occurrence of the emblematic olive-branch in Etruscan paintings, ought to serve as an answer to some speculations of recent writers, in which Dr Arnold has allowed himself to join, respecting the improvement of the Italian climate since the early ages of Rome. But the Etrurians were a commercial, even more than an agricultural people. They traded with the East, and imported from Egypt many a strange mystery, which conjecture has not yet approached; and many a process of art, which modern ingenuity has never revived. They were evidently in constant and intimate connexion with Greece. Their commerce extended to the far south; for their artists were well acquainted with the colour and physiognomy of the negro race. They brought from the west those precious metals, of which they made so lavish a use for purposes of ornament. They gave name to the sea which bathed their shores, and contested its supremacy with the Phoenicians; perhaps ages before Queen Dido had conducted her successful emigration. And, together with their wealth, they possessed a fixed, durable system of society, in which civil and religious institutions were more intimately interwoven than in any other state of antiquity; scarcely excepting Egypt herself, the mother of ancient polity. They had a language and a literature of their own; arts of war and of peace, of which a part are transferred into the usages of Rome, but the greater and more valuable portions perished with them; they had all the magnificence, all the refinements of ancient life-the games and shows of Greece, the domestic and personal comforts, and more than the luxuries of Egypt; the family worship and family institutions of early Rome: and all with a national type and character peculiarly their own.

All these facts have been brought to light by modern research; but the picture, though it seems almost to live and breathe, is absolutely mute. The power and state of old Etruria lie before us like a vision which no man is found to interpret. Its literature was nearly all destroyed in the Roman conquest, though the Emperor Claudius (that rare mixture of learning, stupidity, dulness, sense, and folly, as Mrs Gray calls him, whose soul certainly migrated in after ages into King James I.) collected enough out of what remained to publish twenty books of Etruscan antiquities. But whatever has become of the work of the imperial antiquary, abundant remains of this ancient language exist in inscriptions. They are easily read: the alphabet is merely one of the oldest forms of Greek, read from right to left; but to decipher them defies the powers of learned conjecture, astonishing as the scope of that faculty sometimes is. They pre

sent not the slightest similarity to the Latin, or any of its cognate dialects. This might have been conjectured beforehand, from the manner in which the Romans uniformly speak of it as an entirely foreign speech: Quasi nescio quis Tuscé aut Gallicé dixisset, says Aulus Gellius. Yet writers of the school of Lanzi, which prevailed when Eustace wrote his Classical Tour,' persisted that they knew better than the Romans, and connected the Etruscan with Latin and Greek. Further research has altogether disproved the supposition; but it has furnished no materials for a new one. The antiquarian adept has been wrestling, this many a day, with the Genius who dwells in the sepulchral caverns of Etruria, for the key to that mystic tongue,

· An hundred years are past and gone,

And scarce three letters hath he won.'

RIL AVRIL, vixit annos-these are the only two words, except proper names, to which a meaning has yet been assigned, and these were ascertained long ago. Here and there, fancy succeeds in disentangling from the misty mass a glimpse of something which looks like Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Celtic, or Teutonic; which 6 Even with a thought

The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct

As water is in water.'

In the absence of a known language, the history of this people must be sought in their sepulchres; which we will proceed to search, in company of our enthusiastic guide, Mrs Gray-sometimes, we must own, a little too enthusiastic; for much as we have been interested with her narrative of what she has seen, and almost more of what she has heard, from the Italian friends into whose pursuits she has entered with such singular zest and zeal, we cannot but think the simple narrative would have read a better lesson than all the comments-sentimental and devout-with which it is her pleasure to intersperse it.

No better idea can be given of the general style of the Etruscan tombs, than from the description of the Necropolis of Tarquinii, already noticed. It occupied a long hill, parallel in direction to which the city was built, and lying between it and the coast; and most or all Etruscan cities seem to have had their cemetery placed in the same manner on the nearest height. The tombs of the higher class were generally huge low cylinders of masonry, surmounted by conical mounds of earth, the interior being sunk some depth in the ground; the whole cemetery (according to the imaginary restoration, given at p. 158 of Mrs Gray's work) looking something like an assemblage of enormous

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ice-houses. Sometimes the architect availed himself of a natural elevation in the ground, which was pared and trimmed into the conical shape, and surrounded with the low cylindrical wall at the base. The principal occupant of the tomb generally reposes in a vault within the cone; the lower parts of the construction being filled with tombs of inferior dimensions, perhaps those of his family and dependents. Every Etruscan unviolated tomb, as yet discovered, is most artificially closed by one or two immense stone leaves. Each leaf is a single stone, curiously jointed and hinged, and so very exactly closed, that it is difficult to open without breaking.' The following description of a tomb restored by Campanari, one of the great explorers, according to the exact model of one discovered by himself, which appeared by the inscriptions to have belonged to a noble family of the name of Velthuri, may serve to give a general idea of what is encountered within :

On opening the door, the torches illuminated a chamber nineteen or twenty feet square, with a ledge all round it, on which were laid with great regularity ten or a dozen sarcophagi. They were covered with their lids, each having a well-executed figure of nenfrite or terra cotta as large as life, and sometimes of a size almost colossal, representing either men of grave and substantial appearance, with torques round the neck, and ring on the finger, holding in their hand a patera for libations; or of elegant and richly dressed ladies, their heads adorned with ivy and myrtle wreaths, their ears with graceful pendants, their necks encircled with chains, and their arms with bracelets. Behind each figure was a number of vases piled up in irregular heaps, and some of them hanging above them by bronze nails in the wall.... A larger sarcophagus than any of the others stood in the middle of the chamber. It was uncovered, and contained what remained of the skeleton and armour of the head of the family of Velthuri. There he lay, with his helmet, his greaves, and his two spears, after the fashion of classical antiquity; and all around him in the coffin, there was the strangest assemblage of little odds and ends that I ever saw. If we may be permitted to judge of the old warrior's tastes by the things which were buried with him, he must, in his day and generation, have been a passionate lover of rococo, with very little discrimination; in short, a collector of trash. . . . There were quantities of little pieces of enamel, and transparent-coloured pastas; clear stones or compositions, some like topaz, and others like amethyst; balls of perfume; utensils of bronze, of all sorts, shapes, and sizes, and all manner of uselessness. And lastly, I pulled out what gave me rather an unpleasant insight in Signor Velthuri's character, and a bad idea of the employment of his lighter hours-a pair of dice, which, if my memory fails me not, were loaded. . . . Another and more awful consideration was forced upon us by a closer inspection of this large sarcophagus. On both sides of it there is unequivocally represented a human sacrifice. Whether this relates to any act of old Velthuri's life, I will not undertake to decide. . . . But the subjects of the

bassi relievi of sarcophagi have often no relation to the individual, but are national and historical.'

This, however, is not the only representation of this horrible subject; and it is known that the religion of Etruria sanctioned human sacrifices in some rare occasions. At Clusium, the sarcophagi are recumbent painted statues, of which the head unscrews, and the ashes of the deceased are sometimes discovered within.

Still more unaccountable objects are sometimes discovered in the tombs than old Velthuri's collection of curiosities. In the tomb called General Galassi's,' in the ruins of the ancient Cære, along with an immense and delicately-wrought_breastplate, and many other ornaments of gold, arms, wheels of a car, and other insignia of warlike power and rank, was discovered an inkstand of terra cotta, with what may be termed an Etruscan horn-book, an arrangement of letters and syllables, painted on the outside, which have been deciphered by Dr Lepsius.' Was this a ‘king, ❝ priest, and historian all in one?' or had he promoted Mechanics' Institutes, and Societies for diffusion of useful Knowledge? Sometimes, though very rarely, the adventurous explorer has been gratified with a strangely near glimpse of the mysteries of this sepulchral world. The Gonfaloniere Avolta of Corneto, discovered in Tarquinia the body itself of an Etruscan chief, though he was only permitted one rapid glance before the appearance was mingled with its mother earth, from which it had been so strangely kept apart for thousands of years. • He saw ❝ him crowned with gold,, covered with armour, with a shield, spear, and arrows by his side, and extended on his stone bier. But a change soon came over the figure; it trembled, it crum← bled, and vanished away, and, by the time an entrance was "effected, all that remained was the golden crown and a handful of dust, with some fragments of the arms.'

This extraordinary collection of objects of curiosity and art is never found in Roman sepulchres; and this is one of the points in which the personal customs of two nations so nearly allied in some of their usages, most remarkably differ. From the oldest 'to the most recent of the Roman sepulchres, we never find in◄ terred in them any of the painted vases of Sicily, or Greece, or Etruria; nor yet dresses of war, ceremony, nor war-chariots, 'perfumes, biers, nor armour, the lance excepted. These things were carried with the body to the pile or grave, but were then 'taken home again or burned, but not interred. Merely the ashes of the deceased, or his bones, were laid in his grave, and perhaps some treasure of coins, with clay or glass lachrymatories, and glass or enamelled vases, the latter being most rare.

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