sculptures rich in information of their authors.
From a study of these things, lately disinterred in immense
quantities, has been constructed, for the most part, our present
acquaintance with this ancient people. Strange that, when the
whole scene of life has passed away, a sepulchral world should
survive and open itself to reveal the past and instruct the
future! We seem to see, rising from her tombs, and moving solemnly
among the mounds where all she knew or cared for has for so many
ages been inurned, the ghost of a mighty people. With dejected air
she leans on a ruined temple and muses; and her shadowy tears fall
silently over what was and is not.

The Etruscans were accustomed to bury their deceased outside their
walls; and sometimes the city of the living was thus surrounded by
a far reaching city of the dead. At this day the decaying fronts
of the houses of the departed, for miles upon miles along the
road, admonish the living traveller. These stone hewn sepulchres
crowd nearly every hill and glen. Whole acres of them are also
found upon the plains, covered by several feet of earth, where
every spring the plough passes over them, and every autumn the
harvest waves; but the dust beneath reposes well, and knows
nothing of this.

"Time buries graves. How strange! a buried grave! Death cannot
from more death its own dead empire save."

The houses of the dead were built in imitation of the houses of
the living, only on a smaller scale; and the interior arrangements
were so closely copied that it is said the resemblance held in all
but the light of day and the sound and motion of life. The images

1 Mrs. Gray, Sepulchres of Etruria.

painted or etched on the urns and sarcophagi that fill the
sepulchres were portraits of the deceased, accurate likenesses,
varying with age, sex, features, and expression. These personal
portraits were taken and laid up here, doubtless, to preserve
their remembrance when the original had crumbled to ashes. What a
touching voice is this from antiquity, telling us that our poor,
fond human nature was ever the same! The heart longed to be kept
still in remembrance when the mortal frame was gone. But how vain
the wish beyond the vanishing circle of hearts that returned its
love! For, as we wander through those sepulchres now, thousands of
faces thus preserved look down upon us with a mute plea, when
every vestige of their names and characters is forever lost, and
their very dust scat