270 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY. 



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 abso- 

 lutely certain amid the conflicting theories of ingenious 

 theorists about the Etruscan race, and that one thing 

 is that the Easennae stand in Europe absolutely alone, 

 the sole representatives of some ancient and elsewhere 

 exterminated stock, surviving only in Tuscany itself, and 

 in the Eheetian 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 civiliza- 

 tion. ' Merely receptive European Chinese,' says, in 

 effect, Mommsen, the great Eoman 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 under- 

 lying Etruscan character is the solemn, weird, and 



