the limit in one direction, the tomb cannot be older
than three thousand three hundred years. On the other hand, we know
that Veii was destroyed about four hundred years before Christ, and
remained uninhabited and desolate till the commencement of the Empire;
we have, therefore, the surest ground for fixing the date of the tomb
prior to that event. Somewhere between the invasion of Egypt by the
Etruscan confederacy and the fall of Veii--that is, somewhere between
the fourteenth and the fourth century before Christ--this sepulchre
was hewn in the rock and its tenants interred in it.

Carlo Avolta of Corneto on one occasion, opening an Etruscan tomb at
Tarquinii, saw a most wonderful sight. From an aperture which he had
made above the door of the sepulchre he looked in, and for fully five
minutes "gazed upon an Etruscan monarch lying on his stone bier,
crowned with gold, clothed in armour, with a shield, spear, and arrows
by his side." But as he gazed the figure collapsed, and finally
disappeared; and by the time an entrance was made all that remained
was the golden crown, some fragments of armour, and a handful of gray
dust. Like that Etruscan tomb has been the fate of the Etruscan
confederacy. This mighty people left traces of their civilisation
"inferior in grandeur perhaps to the monuments of Egypt, in beauty to
those of Greece, but with these exceptions surpassing in both the
relics of any other nation of remote antiquity." At the period of
their highest power they lived in close neighbourhood and connection
with a people who got its laws, its rulers, its arts, its religion
from them--and might therefore if only in gratitude have preserved
their history. But their fate was that of the similar civilisation of
Mexico and Peru, which its selfish Spanish conquerors instead of
preserving sought studiously to obliterate. The comprehensive history
of Etruria written in twenty volumes by the emperor Claudius--who,
though very feeble in other things, was yet a scholar, and could have
given us much interesting information--perished. Their language, which
survived their absorption by Rome, almost as late as the time of the
Caesars, finally disappeared; and though thousands of inscriptions in
tombs and on works of art remain--which we are able to read from the
close resemblance of the alphabet to the Greek--the key to the
interpretation of the language is gone beyond recall. In an age that
has unravelled the Egyptian hieroglyphi