a wholly different origin from the Aryans. I am
not going, in a brief essay like this, to settle dogmatically,
off-hand, the vexed question of the origin and affinities of the
Etruscan type; more nonsense, I suppose, has been talked and written
upon that occult subject by learned men than even learned men have ever
poured forth upon any other sublunary topic; but one thing at least, I
take it, is absolutely certain amid the conflicting theories of
ingenious theorists about the Etruscan race, and that one thing is that
the Rasennae stand in Europe absolutely alone, the sole representatives
of some ancient and elsewhere exterminated stock, surviving only in
Tuscany itself, and in the Rhaetian Alps of the Canton Grisons.

At the moment when the Etruscans first appear in history, however, they
appear as a race capable of acquiring and assimilating culture with
great ease, rapidity, and certainty. No sooner do they come into
contact with the Greek world than they absorb and reproduce all that
was best and truest in Greek civilization. 'Merely receptive--European
Chinese,' says, in effect, Mommsen, the great Roman historian: to me,
that judgment, though true in some small degree, seems harsh indeed on
a wider view, when applied to a people who begot at last the 'Divina
Commedia,' the campanile of Florence, the dome of St. Peter's, and the
glories of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. It is quite true that the
Etruscans themselves, like the Japanese in our own time, did at first
accept most imitatively the Hellenic culture; but they gradually
remoulded it by their own effort into something new, growing and
changing from age to age, until at last, in the Italian renaissance,
they burst out with a wonderful and novel message to all the rest of
dormant Europe.

One of the most persistent key-notes of this underlying Etruscan
character is the solemn, weird, and gloomy nature of so much of the
true Etruscan workmanship. From the very beginning they are strong, but
sullen. Solidity and power, rather than beauty and grace, are what they
aim at; and in this, Michael Angelo was a true Tuscan. If we look at
the massive old Etruscan buildings, the Cyclopean walls of Faesulae and
Volterrae, with their gigantic unhewn blocks, or the gloomy tombs of
Clusium, with their heavy portals, and then at the frowning facade of
the Strozzi or the Pitti Palace, we shall see in these, their earliest
and latest terms, the special marks of Tuscan archite