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the inside of a dark sepulchral cave into the meaning of this fresco
of death was emblematical of the groping of the ancient Etruscans, by
such feeble light of nature as they possessed, in the midst of the
profound, terrible darkness of death, for the great truths of
immortality. They had not heard of One who alone with returning
footsteps had broken the eternal silence of the tomb, and brought the
hope of immortal life to the sleeping dead around. These Etruscan
sleepers had been laid to rest in their narrow cell ages before the
Son of Man had rolled away the stone from the door of the sepulchre,
and carried captivity captive; but He whom they ignorantly worshipped
had partially lifted the veil and given them faint glimpses of the
things unseen and eternal. And these were doubtless sufficient to
redeem their life from its vanity and their death from its fear.

Below the fresco which I have thus minutely described is another about
the same size, representing a sphinx, with a nondescript animal, which
may be either an ass or a young deer standing below it, and a panther
or leopard sitting behind in a rampant attitude, with one paw on the
haunch of the sphinx, and the other on the tail, and its face turned
towards the spectator. The face of the sphinx is painted red. The
figure bears some resemblance to the Egyptian type of that chimera in
its straight black hair depending behind, and its oblique eyes; but in
other respects it diverges widely. On Egyptian monuments the sphinx
never appears standing as in this fresco, but crouching in the
attitude of reposeful observation. Its form also was always fuller and
more rounded than the long-legged, attenuated spectre before us, and
it was invariably wingless; whereas the Etruscan sphinx had short
wings with curling points, spotted and barred with stripes of black,
red, and yellow. This strange mixture of the human and the brutal
might be regarded as a symbol of the religious state of the people. We
see in it higher conceptions of religion struggling out of lower. In
the recumbent wingless sphinx of Egypt we see anthropomorphic ideas of
religion emerging out of the gross animal-worship of more primitive
times. In the standing and winged Etruscan Sphinx we see these ideas
assuming a more predominant form; while in the Greek mythology the
emancipation of the human from the brutal was complete, and the gods
appeared wholly in the likeness of men.

On the wall on the opposite sid