and looking vacantly down upon the beautiful child whose cradle she
rocked. Fiesole is perhaps the oldest Italian city. The inhabitants of
middle and lower Italy were Pelasgians by origin, like the earlier
races of Greece. The Etrurians were an aboriginal stock,--that is to
say, as far as anything can be definitely stated regarding their
original establishment in the peninsula; for they, too, doubtless
came, at some remote epoch, from beyond the Altai mountains.

In their arts they seem to have been original,--at least, until at a
later period they began to imitate the culture of Greece. They were
the only ancient Italian people who had the art-capacity; and they
supplied the wants of royal Rome, just as Greece afterwards supplied
the republic and the empire with the far more elevated creations of
her plastic genius.

The great works undertaken by the Tarquins, if there ever were
Tarquins, were in the hands of Etrurian architects and sculptors. The
admirable system of subterranean drainage in Rome, by which the swampy
hollows among the seven hills were converted into stately streets, and
the stupendous _cloaca maxima_, the buried arches of which have
sustained for more than two thousand years, without flinching, the
weight of superincumbent Rome, were Etrurian performances, commenced
six centuries before Christ.

It would appear that this people had rather a tendency to the useful,
than to the beautiful. Unable to assimilate the elements of beauty and
grace furnished by more genial races, this mystic and vanished nation
was rather prone to the stupendously and minutely practical, than
devoted to the beautiful for its own sake.