Mark the nice bounds of vases, ewers, and urns;
295 Round each fair form in lines immortal trace
Uncopied Beauty, and ideal Grace.


[_Etruria! next_. l. 291. Etruria may perhaps vie with China itself in
the antiquity of its arts. The times of its greatest splendour were
prior to the foundations of Rome, and the reign of one of its best
princes, Janus, was the oldest epoch the Romans knew. The earliest
historians speak of the Etruscans as being then of high antiquity, most
probably a colony from Phoenicia, to which a Pelasgian colony acceded,
and was united soon after Deucalion's flood. The peculiar character of
their earthern vases consists in the admirable beauty, simplicity, and
diversity of forms, which continue the best models of taste to the
artists of the present times; and in a species of non-vitreous encaustic
painting, which was reckoned, even in the time of Pliny, among the lost
arts of antiquity, but which has lately been recovered by the ingenuity
and industry of Mr. Wedgwood. It is supposed that the principal
manufactories were about Nola, at the foot of Vesuvius; for it is in
that neighbourhood that the greatest quantities of antique vases have
been found; and it is said that the general taste of the inhabitants is
apparently influenced by them; insomuch that strangers coming to Naples,
are commonly struck with the diversity and elegance even of the most
ordinary vases for common uses. See D'Hancarville's preliminary
discourses to the magnificent collection of Etruscan vases, published by
Sir William Hamilton.]


"GNOMES! as you now dissect with hammers fine
The granite-rock, the nodul'd flint calcine;