1845.] Mrs. Gray's History of Etruria. 211 ART. VII.-The History of Etruria, Part I., Tarchun and his Times. From the Foundation of Tarquinia (Tarquinii?) to the Foundation of Rome. By Mrs. HAMILTON GRAY. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 187, Piccadilly. 1843. 1 vol. 12mo., pp. viii., 432. HAD the singular volume before us been written by any thing laying claim to the honours, and obnoxious to the liabilities, of the genus masculinum, our course of procedure in its examination would have been obvious and easy; nor should we have hesitated a moment in determining the language to be employed in criticising it. We should have either passed it by altogether without notice, or we should have ridiculed its follies, exposed its fallacies, pointed out its defects, corrected its inaccuracies, chastised its blunders, and concluded by recommending the author to knit stockings than write such books, and by advising our friends to employ their time more profitably than in their perusal. To attain the last object more effectually, by giving additional force to our recommendation and advice, we might possibly have yielded to the strong temptation held out, and have exaggerated the deficiencies of the work into a caricature, in some such strain as this: The remarkable book before us, purporting to be a History of Etruria, makes a very pleasing romance, and may have been designed as an accompaniment to the famous "True Histories" of Lucian. Unfortunately for novel readers, but most fortunately for us and other students of history, it is still unfinished:-one part only has been printed; three more are threatened; but, as this menace presents a dignus vindice nodus, we may rightfully hope for the interposition of some divinity to defeat its accomplishment. Should our expectations be disappointed, we shall be compelled to conclude that Apollo and the Muses have for ever deserted the steeps of Parnassus and the waters of Helicon, and that there is now no deity to whom the critic in his need may turn for assistance. The threat, however, may have been merely held out in terrorem, to induce us to purchase the silence of the author, on the same principle that swindling letters, of a well-known character, are sent to extort money by acting on the fears of individuals. Incredulous readers have denied the veracity of Baron Munchausen's Travels, and Gulliver's Voyages to Lilliput and Laputa, but we think, after reading this work, on insufficient grounds, for in this veritable History of Etruria, stranger things are affirmed, and facts invented or set aside, with even less ceremony, than in those celebrated narratives. According to the old saying, the book contains many things which are new, and some which are true, but the true things are not new, and the new things are not true,-a misfortune which should not, perhaps, be imputed as any very great crime to the writer, since it is by no means of rare occurrence in our day. The work is dexterously besprinkled with the parings of secondhand learning, which has been painfully raked together from the foot-notes of essayists, and the suggestions of friends; and we must express our admiration of the hardihood and ingenuity of the historian, who would attempt so arduous a task as has been here undertaken, with such a slender stock of materials. To the lover of romance, these will appear to be slight objections,-he will be delighted with the imaginary world to which he will be introduced, and perhaps he may institute a comparison between Tarchún, the hero of the present tale, and Amadis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England. This would certainly have been done by Lord Camden, had that diligent reader of all fiction been now living to enjoy this History of Etruria.-And so we might go on, admitting the while that this exaggeration would amount to *caricature. But, in the present case, we dare not adopt this mode of criticism, the author with whom we are concerned, is a lady, though she has endeavoured to appropriate the propria quæ maribus,-and such language as this would be impolite, and might even be deemed improper. We cannot bolster up our conscience, or restrain our courtesy, by musing on the text of Virgil : namque etsi nullum memorabile nomen and it would be a new form of petty treason, to be caught humming the bitter sarcasm of Voltaire : Ciel, que je hais ces créatures fières, Sans posséder les agrémens du vôtre, A tous les deux prétendant faire honneur, All that we could venture upon with safety, would be, to whisper aside the sensible ejaculation of the witty Martial: sit mihi non doctissima conjux! But this does not concern us; it is entirely the care of Mr. Hamilton Gray-should that worthy be alive. He may have a penchant for blues, and a relish for a blue wife,-we candidly confess we have none. But, perhaps, our best plan will be to exclude sedulously all such reflections, and to regard Mrs. Gray, in her present volume, as a lady who has wandered out of the path, trespassed on her neighbour's grounds, and lost her way in places, overgrown with shrubbery, with which she is not familiar. Had she done so really, and not metaphorically, it would have been our pleasure, as well as our incumbent duty, to accost her deferentially, however much we might blame or pity her, and civilly to lead her into the right path again, when we might fairly claim and exercise the privilege of advising her, for her own sake, not to trust herself a second time in such unknown and unfamiliar regions. We will adopt the same course towards her as an authoress, which, in the case supposed, we should have approved,-we will show that she has mistaken her route, and explain to her the cause; and if, on some future occasion, she will accompany us through the pleasure-grounds of the manor into which she has been heedlessly beguiled, we will promise to leave her safely outside of the precincts, when we have concluded. our pilgrimage, even should she or others doubt the accuracy of the route which we may have taken. This we would do very willingly at present, had we time for so long a ramble, but only a very few pages can now be permitted to us for our peregrinations, so that we must defer these to another day, and content ourselves with explaining the manner in which Mrs. Gray has so completely bewildered herself. This we shall do with as much tenderness and leniency as the occasion will permit; but we do hope that our courtesy may suffice to prevent Mrs. Gray from breaking the close, treading down the grass, and subverting the soil, in the same place again. To carry out our purpose, therefore, and give a more definite criticism of the work, we may say that it is, in every respect, a singular one :-singular in its authorship, singular in its subject, and singular in its style. It would have been remarkable if it had been produced by a man of great ingenuity but ordinary attainments; it is almost miraculous as the production of a woman. The learning in it is extensive, though by no means complete, accurate, profound, or even diligently sifted: the reasoning is daring, though seldom logical: the speculations ingenious, but too frequently fanciful, and almost invariably supported on an imaginary or unsound basis: still, there is evidence of considerable hardihood in the main hypothesis, and the arguments adduced to sustain it; of some energy in the collection of materials; and of no little tact in the plausible manner in which they have been employed for the framing of a novel and pleasing theory. But the talent exhibited is, we fear, thrown away, for the subject is one interesting to scholars only: to them, Mrs. Gray's History would be valueless, for it has neither that depth nor that erudition which archæological researches demand; and to others, it would be unintelligible from the admixture of antiquarian discussion. For the preparation of the work, some portion of the classics must have been read, however imperfectly,-(we fear that they were read in translations, and suspect, from certain marks, that these translations were principally Italian.) Defective as this study is, it is a note-worthy phenomenon, for Mrs. Gray lives in an age foreign to the habits of that good old time, when her namesake, Lady Jane, was to be found in her garden, entertaining herself with the perusal of Plato's Phæ don. But Lady Jane, we suspect, had a much better acquaintance with the classics than our present lady antiquarian; for we must infer, from the evidence before us, that the latter has no very intimate familiarity either with the relics of Greece and Rome, or with the tongues in which they were written, as is evinced by the constant recurrence of awkward solecisms, and errors with regard to the elementary points of those languages, which cannot, indeed, mislead the scholar, though, in our day, the unlucky school-boy, who had committed such blunders, would have been well whipped for them. We cannot pretend to enumerate these, for they are to be found in nearly every page, including the title-page. We may mention a few-On the title-page is Tarquinia for Tarquinii, and this occurs every where throughout the book. Silvius Italicus for Silius, more than once, p. 59. Auruncia, for the country of the Aurunci; there is no such name,-p. 76. Helenes for Hellenes,-p. 88. Atheni, Lacedæmoni, for Athenienses, Lacedæmonii,p. 90. Phthiotides, for Phthiotis, bis, p. 95. notri for Enotri, p. 105. Falleria for Falerii, p. 114, and continually. Volterra for Volaterræ,-p. 155. Rusella and Volsinia, for Rusellæ and Volsinii,-p. 117. Phocian for Phocœan, p. 173. Falisci, the people, for Falerii, the town,p. 175. Spondophorai for Spondophoroi, p. 204. Fidene for Fidenæ,-p. 209. One jugera !!-pp. 215, 234. Agger for Ager, pp. 219, 232. Scuta for Scutum,-p. 243. Potizii for Potitii,-p. 268. λorexvoi, lovers of children, for Corexvo, lovers of art,-p. 317, bis, etc. etc. etc. Mistakes such as these, though scarcely of any great consequence in themselves, indicate a very slight and defective acquaintance with languages, which the historian of Etruria ought to be perfectly familiar with. But it is a notable fact that a lady should have ventured to dive into the mysteries of anteRoman Italy, or that, having attempted it, she should not have failed more signally than she has done. Mrs. Gray has selected for her first effort, in her unfeminine department of scholarship, a strange but interesting subject:-the History of the Rasena, and the early races of Italy. The clouds of time, and the mists of vague tradition, have gathered and thickened around this difficult portion of history, from so remote a period, that the most erudite scholars, the most diligent investigators of Etruscan antiquities, have wrangled and doubted about the few inferences which have hitherto been hazarded, and the ingenuity of Niebuhr has been exercised, while his sagacity has been baffled, in the vain attempt to roll back the darkness which has settled upon it. The field is open for fanciful conjecture, or cautious examination :-to ourselves nothing seems as yet to have been determined, but that the Etruscans were a great people before the Fates had revealed the Roman dominion to the nations; and that Etruria transmitted to Rome the seeds of her polity, of her civil and religious institutions, and of her domestic manners. The Etruscans were truly a wonderful people,-civilized before Greece, and possessing a civilization diverse from the Grecian, the Egyptian, and the Oriental, they breathed life into Rome, and through her have been the ancestors of much of our modern organization. Singular destiny for such a people, that they should have lived with |