ference of habits and of institutions, perhaps also the admixture of foreign blood, had impressed a dissimilar character upon them. In history, the Pelasgians are always a feeble and a failing race: subjected, as Enotrians,* to be the slavish tillers of the soil in southern Italy; and it may have been that the Helots of Laconia were of Pelasgian blood too. But a dim tradition of earlier times has come down to us,— of times when all their power had not vanished in Greece, and when they filled Italy with their towns from the mouths of the Arno to the southern shores of Calabria. They may once have been nations, great by their number, and the extent of their territories, respectable among the wild tribes around them by their arts and civilization, and attractive to modern inquirers from their connection with the history of Greece and Rome. But the glory of their existence, if it has the beauty, has also the indistinctness of a half-forgotten dream of the night,-and the relics which they have left behind in their massive structures, are like those fossil shells whence the living creature that formed them has long vanished, the case is there, shattered, desolate, but curious,where are the indications of life?

Yet, whatever may have been the fortunes or the misery of the Pelasgians,--whatever the antiquity of their decline, they were the true fathers of Greek and Roman civilization, and hence of all modern advancement of the human race. Thus, all that concerns them must be of the deepest interest for us, notwithstanding the uncertainty and confusion of the traditions respecting them, and the mesh of perplexities with which they embarrass rather than enlighten our researches. The language of Greece was Pelasgian in its roots, and probably in its inflections also,-the institutions of Greece and its religion were Pelasgian,-and Athens, that bright city of the heart, which is rendered illustrious and immortal by the beautiful dreams of its mythology,-by the freedom of its government, the ease and elegance of its society,--by the heroic gallantry of its citizens,-by the glories of its statesmanship and war,-by the imperishable grace and brilliancy of its intellect, by the magic of its works of art, and, more than all, by that poetic loveliness with which it invested every thing relating to it,-Athens was pre-eminently Pelasgic, its population being almost purely and entirely of Pelasgian blood.

* Niebuhr, Hist. Rome, vol. 1. 'The Enotrians and Pelasgians.'

The civilization of Rome, too, owed much to the Pelasgians. The settled nations along the western coast of Italy were either of Pelasgian descent, or derived the greater part of their cultivation from the Pelasgians,-certainly those to the south of the Tiber, and probably the Etruscans also,but this remains to be determined. But whatever cultivation existed elsewhere, was rapidly absorbed into the capacious womb of the great city. In the commencement and earlier existence of Rome, as in the days of her splendor, she was the recipient of all that was excellent or notable in the countries within her grasp. She appeared to be gifted with some supernatural power, by which she attracted into her wide bosom whatever lay within her reach, that could add to her strength or permanence, and in so doing, she destroyed the form of those bodies from which she drained her sustenance, and resolved them into their dissociated elements. Like the magnetic rock of the Indian seas, fabled in the wild tales of the East, which drew to itself the nails, the rivets, and the irons of the luckless vessels that passed by the coast, and thus left the spars to float dissevered or to rot on the bosom of the deep, so did the mighty Rome by all those nations that came within the range of her power. They crumbled into the dust, but she attracted to herself the links and rivets, the chains and the bolts which had previously held them in compact bodies. And thus, drawing her life and her nourishment from the nations of Italy around her, she received her civilization from those institutions which had been founded by the Pelasgians and the Etruscans. If we conceive the origin and the civilization of these peoples to have been distinct, still she derived much,-not least, her language,from the Pelasgians; if we regard them as identical, then might she have attributed to this scarcely recognized race of the ancient world, all that added dignity to her greatness, and intelligence to her brute energy. Vast must therefore have been the influence, in the world's career, of the widelyspread Pelasgians, who are more to be honoured in their posterity than in themselves, though they must be considered as the undoubted parents in Europe of all our civilization.

We have not alluded to the connexion between the Tyrrhenians and Pelasgians, because the consideration of this point has been more appropriately reserved till we have come to speak of the Etruscans, as the Tyrrhenians appeared with greater power, refinement and intelligence in Etruria

than elsewhere. And in the last paragraph we barely hinted at the possibility that the Etruscans might themselves have been Pelasgians, but we will now direct our attention to these points. We shall not attempt to originate any new theory respecting either the Tyrrhenians or the Etruscans, for the scanty sources of information within our reach would scarcely justify so bold an attempt, neither shall we venture to develope our objections to the hypotheses which have been already started, for we have not the conscience to tax our readers with the tedious details of so difficult an inquiry, especially at the end of a long and dry discussion. We shall do little more than merely state the more remarkable opinions which have been hazarded upon these subjects, expressing at the same time our apprehension that no conclusive or satisfactory inferences can be drawn, until some new Champollion or Rosellini may arise to reveal the hidden mysteries which remain still locked up in the ancient sepulchres of Etruria.

According to the old legends, the Tyrrhenians came by sea from Lydia. The current story was, that "in the reign of Atys, son of Manes king of Lydia, the country was afflicted with a grievous famine, which the people long bore with great patience, but finding that the evil did not cease, they sought a remedy, and each one imagined what pleased himself best. Upon this occasion, they invented dice, ball and all sorts of games, excepting eddo, calculi, a sort of drafts, of which they were not the inventors; and they played at these new games one day and fasted, whilst they ate, and, it is to be hoped, worked on the day following. In this manner they continued to live for eighteen years! But, at last, the evil, instead of diminishing, increased, and the king, Atys, divided his people into two bands, and made them draw lots, the one to remain and the other to quit the country. Those who departed had for chief the king's son, Tyrsenus. The banished Lydians first went to Smyrna, where they constructed vessels, loaded them with furniture and useful implements and embarked to go in search of food and habitation elsewhere. After coasting along several countries, they landed in Umbria, where they built cities, which," says Herodotus, "they inhabit now."*

This is Mrs. Gray's version of the tale reported by Hero

* Herodotus, lib. i., cap. xcv., cit. Mrs. Hamilton Gray's Hist. Etruria, vol. 1, p. 9, chap. 1.

dotus. The same legend, probably derived from the same author, is told by Servius:* and was deemed by most of the ancients to be a credible account of the origin of the Tyrrhenian Etruscans, as is sufficiently evinced by the language employed by them in speaking of the Etruscans. Thus, this people is called by Silius Italicus, Maonia Gens. The same belief has been entertained by many modern scholars of note,-by Cumberland, Larcher, Dempster, Lanzi, etc.,— of course, without acknowledging the correctness of its improbable details. On the other hand, its reasonableness has been strongly denied by Cluverius, Freret, Heyne and others. New hypotheses have been proposed, some of which are sustained by the authority of very distinguished names. Bonarotti supposed the Etruscans (i. e. Tyrrhenians) to have been descended from the Egyptians. This is substantially Mrs. Gray's notion. Maffei and Mazocchi traced them to the Canaanites, Swinton discovered their ancestors in the Phoenicians, Pelloutier and Bardetti conceived them to have sprung from the Celts; Freret from the Rætians, and Hervas from the ancient Cantabrians..

Mrs. Hamilton Gray "thinks it not doubtful, borne out at least by every collateral proof, that they were a colony from the great and ancient city of Resen, or RSN, as it is written in the Hebrew Bible, the capital of Aturia in the land of Assyria," etc. From the place of their origin, they wandered or were carried into Egypt, when they included among the Hyksos, and whence, being expelled or emigrated, they settled in Etruria. The chief argument on which this conjecture is founded, is, that the letters RSN of Resen occur in the name of the TyRSeNi. But, by the same reasoning, we might prove that Savannah, Memphis and Boston were respectively founded by Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Mrs. Gray does, indeed, endeavour to confirm this supposed origin of the Tyrrhenians, by an imagined similarity be tween the institutions, the customs, and the architecture of Egypt and Etruria, yet we cannot wholly refrain from conceiving, that the secret of Mrs. Gray's adoption of her wild and peculiar theory, is truly to be found in the supposed resemblance of names, which happen to possess three conso nants in common. It is but justice, however, to remark that,

* Serv. ad Virg. Æn. i., 71.

+ Silius Italicus, Punic, lib. viii., 486.

Mrs. Hamilton Gray, Hist. Etruria, vol. 1, p. 21, chap. 1.

though she does derive the TyRSeNi in this manner from RSN, yet she first identifies, or thinks that she has identified, the Tyrseni with the RaSeNa, between which name and R SEN there is an obvious resemblance, though nothing that would support her theory.

The race of the Rasena, whom Mrs. Gray considers identical with the Tyrrhenians, is first mentioned by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. He discovered in Etruscan history the traces, as he thought, of two distinct and original races, the Tyrrhenians and the Rasena; and this supposition has been adopted by the most profound scholars who have written on the difficult subject. Muller, in his celebrated work on the Etruscans, considers the Rasena to have been the rude and primitive population of the northern region of Italy; he regards their origin as undiscoverable, but thinks that they received their language, their civilization and their institutions, by their admixture with the Tyrrhenians or Pelasgians from Lydia. Niebuhr differs from him in regarding the Pelasgians, that is the Tyrrhenians, as the original inhabitants of the country, and the Rasena as barbarous conquerors, who poured down from the Rhætian Alps, dispossessed them of their territories, but received at their hands the rudiments of their after arts and refinement. Certain it is, that the Etruscans must either have had a more frequent and intimate communion with Greece in ante-historic periods, or they must have derived from the Pelasgians those numerous ele ments of their polity and society which assimilate them to the Greeks.

The process of reasoning, by which Mrs. Gray endeavors to establish the Syro-Egyptian origin of the Etruscans, is singular, but so rash and fanciful that it hardly merits serious refutation, at least, until it be confirmed by new discoveriesor stronger evidence than she has been able to adduce. We do not object to her theory that it is a speculation raised up-on a bold inference, but that its truth depends upon many separate inferences, wholly disconnected with each other, and each deduced by the same daring ratiocination which characterizes the main conclusion.

The similarity, supposed by Mrs. Gray to exist, between the Etruscan ruins and the monuments of Egyptian architecture, may be more fanciful than real; assuredly the resemblance is equally great between the latter and the monstrous piles raised by the now forgotten Mexicans. It may VOL. VII.-NO. 14.

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