ed as cutting off one breast, and as meeting lovers on the frontier once a-year, we are transported back to the banks of the Thermodon, and become convinced that those parts of the story were furnished by Strabo and Diodorus, not by any Indian authority.

The Rio Negro is the most important tributary of the Maranon. Its dark tint is imputed by Mr Maw to an infusion of iron; by Rodriguez, to the clearness of the water, which renders the dark rocks beneath visible. At Barra, a town near the mouth of the Rio Negro, Mr Maw found himself again on the confines of the civilized world. There was a governor, troops, and European society. He ate bread for the first time for two months; the Portuguese up the river using merely the farina of manioc, which, throwing back the head, they pitch into the mouth with surprising dexterity; and Mr Maw suffered in their estimation by the little skill with which he executed this manœuvre.

Mr Maw concludes with some general observations, which are extremely sensible, and in a superior style to the rest of his book. The territory of the Maranon, including the immense tracts watered by its tributaries, is perhaps superior in natural capacities to any other region on the face of the globe. That of the Mississippi can alone come into competition, and has indeed many common features. But it has barrens, and inundated bottoms, which interrupt the general fertility. In the magnificent plain watered by the Maranon, no such interruptions have as yet been discovered. Even the tract immediately bordering the river, though forming so immense a plain, is so far elevated above the channel, as to be in no danger of being converted into swamp. This vast region, which might af ford support to a crowded population, is occupied only by a few bands of savages, and a few handfuls of Europeans worse than savage. In order to bring it within the domain of culture and industry, the most powerful agent seemingly would be steam navigation. Mr Maw also suggests, that the introduction of steam navigation along the coasts of Brazil, would not only be of great commercial value, but would have a most salutary influence in making the power of the general government felt in places which are at present in a very lawless and turbulent state.

ART. IV.-1. Monumenti Etruschi, o di Etrusco nome, disegnati, incisi, illustrati e publicati dal Cavaliere Francesco Inghirami. Badia Fiesolena dai torchi dal autore. 6 vols. 4to.

1825.

1821

2. Die Etrusker. Vier Bücher, von Karl Otfried Müller. (The Etruscans, in four books, by K. O. Müller; an Essay which obtained the prize from the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin.) 2 vols. 8vo. Breslau. 1828.

THE

HE origin of the Etruscan nation was involved in a degree of uncertainty, at the time when the earliest of our ancient historians wrote, which was hardly to have been expected, considering their extended dominion,-their immemorial possession of an alphabet,-the existence among them of a sacerdotal caste, and their acknowledged superiority in civilisation to all their European contemporaries, except the Greeks. Their subsequent history is chiefly known from their connexion with other nations; for never having cultivated their language, so as to attain to the possession of a literature, their writings have long since perished; and what they recorded on brass or marble, is far less intelligible than the hieroglyphics of Egypt. There has been no want of diligence on the part of the modern Tuscans, to collect and illustrate the ancient monuments of their country, and compare them with the Greek and Latin writers; the works which have been published on this subject within the last century attest their learning and their zeal; yet it must be confessed, that till the impartial criticism of writers beyond the Alps was exercised on the ample materials which the Italians had brought together, they had been used chiefly for the erection of hypotheses. The appearance of the two works, of which we have given the titles above, will afford us an opportunity of laying before our readers the combined result of the most recent antiquarian and historical research.

Our countryman, Thomas Dempster, may be said to have laid the foundation of an accurate knowledge of Etruscan history and antiquities. Several years of his wandering and eventful life were spent in Italy. In 1616 the Grand Duke invited him to teach jurisprudence at Pisa, and his residence there probably gave rise to his work De Etruria Regali. When he left Pisa, in 1619, to go to Bologna, he dedicated his book to the Grand Duke, and in his dedication offered to return and complete it whenever he should summon him. He taught at Bologna till his death, in 1625, but the Etruria Regalis remained in the same state in which he had left it, when

he quitted Pisa, and was not published till 1726. It was then given to the world by the munificence of an Englishman, Thomas Coke, afterwards Earl of Leicester, who greatly increased its value by the addition of numerous engravings of Etruscan antiquities and works of art, and a very correct transcript of the Eugubine Tables. A learned appendix, by Buonarroti, contains explanations of the plates. The Etruria Regalis is such a book as might have been expected from a man, whose boundless memory justified him in saying, that he knew not what it was to forget, but whose restless temper and frequent change of residence and pursuit, prevented his perfecting any work by mature reflection and persevering research. His four dynasties of Etruscan kings, beginning with Janus, the first after the deluge, and ending with Mæcenas, the progenitor of the friend of Augustus, are quite after the fashion of that age of historical criticism, when it would have been thought a great omission not to have traced an ancient people, at the latest, to a grandson of Noah; and when every dynasty began with a god, and numbered among its sovereigns mountains, rivers, and personifications of every kind. The reader, therefore, must not look for discrimination or selection, but he will find a complete repository of every thing in the classics connected with Etruscan history; of which succeeding writers have freely availed themselves. Dempster's works on Scottish history have fallen into low esteem, for he wanted that sturdy morality which is a necessary check on patriotic exaggeration; but his Etruria Regalis, and his Paralipomena ad Rosinum, will be lasting monuments of an extraordinary knowledge of antiquities. The publication of his long buried work, seems immediately to have kindled the zeal of the Tuscan antiquaries. When letters flourished under the patronage of the Medici, the curiosity of the learned had been directed towards the ancient languages of Italy; and researches had been made in the sepulchral chambers which surround most of the old Etruscan towns, by which inscriptions, urns, and various relics of antiquity had been obtained. But the seventeenth century was a period of political servitude to Italy; and the effects of that stagnation of intellect which has been so eloquently described by Sismondi,* extended themselves even to the study of antiquities. The forgeries of Annius of Viterbo, and Curtius Inghirami, (whom the reader must be careful not to confound in a moment of chronological somnolence with the Cavaliere Francesco,) had, besides, disgusted

De la Litterature du Midi, ch. 15.

men with the whole science. The consequence was, that the monuments which had been disinterred, were dispersed and lost; and if any thing new was by accident brought to light, it shared the same fate. The sculptured sarcophagus was broken to pieces, burnt to lime, or converted into a horse trough; and what was not wantonly destroyed, was allowed to be corroded by exposure to the weather. Such neglect of the remains of antiquity marks a people stupidly incurious about the past; but have the citizens of Volterra been the only offenders? A few relics only had escaped in 1726, when Buonarroti made his drawings for the illustration of Dempster. The publication of his work, however, immediately led to new researches, and encouraged the Tuscan literati to cultivate the neglected field of their native antiquities. These researches were rewarded by so many discoveries in the neighbourhood of Volterra, that Buonarroti and Gori persuaded the Grand Duke to establish a Museum in that place for their reception. Not long after (1737) Gori himself published his Museum Etruscum, containing 200 plates of inedited antiquities; Passeri, by his Dissertations subjoined to the Museum of Gori, his Paralipomena ad Dempsterum, and his Picture Etruscorum in Vasculis, (though the title of this last work involves a false hypothesis,) contributed perhaps more than any other man to diffuse the knowledge of the Etruscan monuments. Three brothers of the family Guarnacci especially distinguished themselves by their activity in carrying on excavations around Volterra, and collected a sufficient number of antiquities to form a museum of their own, little inferior to that of the town: their museum furnished the plates for the third volume of the Museum Etruscum of Gori, published in 1743, and it was united by the donation of Mario Guarnacci to the public Museum of Volterra, in 1785. The same spirit of research was extended to other places,-Perusia, Arezzo, Cortona, Tarquinii and Clusium: an Etruscan academy was established at Cortona in 1742, which has published nine volumes of its Dissertations. No country of equal extent with Tuscany can boast so large a body of antiquities, or so many works devoted to their illustration.

Volterra, however, as it was the first to give the example, has always continued the most conspicuous; and from its collections, almost exclusively, Inghirami has derived the subjects for his great work. It is an extraordinary production of the skill and labour of an individual;—the drawings having been wholly made by himself, and the engravings executed either by his own hand, or by pupils whom he had trained expressly for this purpose. It comprehends five different series;-Urns, (what are

more commonly called Sarcophagi,) Fictile Vases, Bronzes, Mystic Mirrors, (usually called Patera,) and Edifices, besides a volume of illustrative plates. Notwithstanding the splendour and costliness of the works in which Etruscan antiquities have been exhibited, no really faithful representations of them have been given till now. The artists who have been employed to make drawings of the fictile vases in particular, seem to have imagined that any defect of delineation or finish might be imputed to their want of skill: even the valuable atlas which accompanies Micali's Italia avanti il Dominio dei Romani, embellishes the Etruscan sculpture. Inghirami's engravings, on the contrary, are drawn and coloured with such exact fidelity, that the reader may form as correct an idea of them, as if he were accompanying the learned Director through his museum of Volterra. His descriptions are minute and clear, and his views and reasonings on subjects of art are comprehensive, and free from patriotic prejudice. We cannot say as much in praise of his explanations, which are prolix, and frequently appear to us to be fanciful. His leading principles are, that every thing in the antiquities of the subterraneous chambers must allude to the passage of the soul from this world to another; that the descent of the sun to Capricorn was regarded as symbolical of this passage; and that the Greek heroic history represents the course of the sun among the constellations. These things the author thinks he has established on the authority of Porphyry and Plotinus, Macrobius and Dupuis; so that whether a sculpture represent the decapitation of Medusa, or the mutual slaughter of Eteocles and Polynices, or any thing else, it finds its ready explanation.

The Academy of Sciences at Berlin, by proposing the Etruscans as the subject of a prize essay, showed their opinion, that the time was come when the scattered notices of the ancient writers should be combined with the discoveries in Etruscan antiquities which the last century brought to light, and the historical truth separated from the mass of contradictory theories, beneath which successive writers have buried it. Professor

Müller, whose essay obtained the crown, is already known by his Orchomenus und die Minyer, and his Dorier; two works in which an extraordinary extent of reading in archæology and ancient literature is united to great sagacity in reconstructing from its fragments the ruined edifice of early Greek history. The present volumes, amidst a somewhat profuse display of reading, contain by far the best account extant, both of the history and the antiquities of Etruria, and fill up an important void in lite

rature.

Even in ancient times it was a disputed question, whether