"When the wary hero wise,
His hand now familiar with the bow,
Poising it and examining--at once;
As when in harp and song adept, a bard
Unlabouring strains the chord to a new lyre,
The twisted entrails of a sheep below
With fingers nice inserting, and above--
With such facility Ulysses bent
His own huge bow, and with his right hand play'd
The nerve, which in its quick vibration sung
Clear as a swallow's voice."

With equal confidence Scrieck addresses himself to decipher the tablets of
Gubbio. "That the Dutch was the language of Etruria," he says, "appears
not only from these unquestionably Celtic (_i. e._ Dutch) names of the
most ancient places in Italy, but also by that extraordinary monument of
antiquity, the Etruscan inscription, which, Gruter writes me, was found
some years back at Eugubio (Gubbio) in Etruria, on eight brazen tablets:
the first written in inverted Greek letters, and the rest in Latin
characters." These, upon examination, he pronounces to be clearly Dutch,
and as a specimen adds some sentences of the sixth table,
beginning--SERVERENT: PEMIMUMS: SERVERENT: DEITU: ETAIS EUO: PRIMATER,
&c.; and containing, according to his account, near the end the following
passage: SERBA MARTIA EPUSTOTE SERFIA SERFIR MARTIA TENSA SERFIR SARFER
MARTIA FUTUTO. Of which he gives the following version, premising that the
's' in his copy has an additional stroke, which makes it sound ST. STERVE
MAR TIE EVVERSTOTE STERFTE STERVER MAER TIER DUERSAFT STERTE STERVER MAR
TIER VUT-VUTE; _i. e._ "Let him only die the death who is an extern; let
them only die the death who are externs; let them only die the death who
are outer externs;" being, as he says, a deprecation merely of the evils
of mortality, and a prayer for their infliction on strangers, as Horace
says--

Hinc bellum lacrymosum, hinc miseram famem
Pestemque a populo et principe Caesare, in
Persas atque Britannos,
Vestra motus aget prece."

Having rendered this and the incantation for the cure of sprains, given in
Cato, "De Re Rustica," into the old Dutch, of which we have had so many
specimens, he closes this summary of his labours with the declaration,
that whoever, after these proofs, will assert that the Etruscan language
was other than the Dutch, cannot be considered otherwise than as _non
compos mentis_.

We had little expectation, when laughing at these vagaries of Scrieck and
Becan, many years ago, that it would yet