WITHIN a few years past an unusual interest has been excited in the scattered remains of ancient civilization that have survived to our day. Greater zeal has been shown than ever before manifested, in bringing to light the relics that fortunate accident or enthusiastic research had not yet disturbed in their repose of centuries. Nor has the zeal of recent explorers been without reward. The European journals have lately recorded discoveries interesting in the extreme to the antiquary. More and more has been revealed to us of the institutions and achievements of nations whose written history is either entirely wanting, or brief and unreliable. Facts, which partisan historians perverted, have been established, without the shadow of a doubt, by some ruined temple, some moss-covered, time-eaten inscription, or buried monument. The memories of heroes whose names were barely known to us through the mists of tradition, their deeds and very persons, have been brought before us with startling distinctness. It is not long since, that the name and other mementos of the prophet Jonah were discovered in the mounds that have so long buried mighty Nineveh; and recent intelligence from Asia informs us that the body

of her greatest monarch, Nebuchadnezzar, has been disinterred from the same vicinity, together with a likeness carved on his sarcophagus, the likeness of one whose very existence we realize far less than the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. And strangest of all, the annals, for long centuries, of nations enlightened and prosperous in their day, as Thebes and Etruria, of whom hitherto we knew little more than that they once were, - have been literally recovered from the tomb. The dynasties, the conquests, and the arts of the Ante-Mosaic Egyptians have been deciphered from the catacombs of the Thebais, and the whole domestic life, we might almost say, of a race that flourished when Evander tilled the Palatine, are seen pictured to-day in the rifled sepulchres of Tuscany.

Before these tombs were opened, Italian antiquarians seldom went back farther in their researches than the time of Augustus. It was the great wonder of the age, when Pompeii was discovered, that so perfect a miniature of the Roman world should have been preserved sixteen centuries for our study. Yet we had full records of those times, and felt familiar with Seneca and Pliny, to whose contemporaries we were so suddenly introduced. But when Pompeii flourished, a nation as gay and prosperous as its inhabitants had perished and been almost forgotten. Since this nation fell, dictators and emperors, serried legion and steel-clad army, have swept over their graves, and a world-wide empire has slowly risen and passed away; yet these tombs have survived the desolations of thousands of years, as fresh as when the last urn was interred. It seems like going back to the fount of time to attempt realizing the truths that these Etruscan relics bring home to us. Historians resolve Romulus and Tarquin into poetic licenses, and question whether Lucrece ever bled, or Cincinnatus ever guided his plough; but we can almost show the pateræ, lamps, and vases that were used before the remotest date of these mythical personages.

We have stepped back many centuries from the Augus

tan age in our antiquarian knowledge of Italy, and begin to look upon Rome as of yesterday; we become deeply interested in this people, who have lived for posterity only in their sepulchres; we study records of private worth, or of private misfortune; we learn their science, their superstitions, their rites, their customs of life and burial; we become familiar with their institutions, while tradition faintly echoes of their downfall. But we also meet with the relics of a race that lived before these institutions arose, whose name and story are utterly lost. Ages before the dawn of history, in the primeval times of Italy, this race built citadels and reared walls, whose gigantic ruins have received the name of Cyclopean.

The difference between the Etruscan and the ante-Etruscan periods is clearly marked by the character of their mural remains. The Cyclopean towns were set on elevated sites, upon mountain slopes, or on the crests of hills, whose craggy sides seem only to be scaled by the eagle's wing. This feature shows a state of society where each isolated hamlet was in constant war with its neighbor, and men lived in almost aboriginal barbarism. Such is

"Volaterra, where scowls the far-famed hold

Built by the hands of giants for godlike kings of old."

The Etrurian cities are found in valleys, in the midst of fertile plains, seldom on hill-tops, and sometimes on the seashore, like

"The proud mart of Pisa, queen of the western waves,"

showing comparatively peaceful relations between them, and the more settled state required by agricultural interests; indicating too, with other facts, no little attention to commerce. The style of their workmanship also attests to Etrurian superiority. The Cyclopean walls are irregular, built of huge blocks generally of calcareous rock, piled together at random, and often untouched by the chisel. The later walls are usually made of blocks of volcanic stone, cut to a rec