omage, "with tedious pomp and
rich retinue long," has given the artist an opportunity of exhibiting
more power in perspective and fore-shortening than one could expect at
that epoch. There are mules and horses, caparisoned and bedizened;
some led by grinning blackamoors, others ridden by showy kings,
effulgent in brocade, glittering spurs, and gleaming cuirasses. Here
are horsemen travelling straight towards the spectator,--there, a
group, in an exactly opposite direction, is forcing its way into the
picture,--while hunters with hound and horn are pursuing the stag on
the neighboring hills, and idle spectators stand around, gaping and
dazzled; all drawn with a free and accurate pencil, and colored with
much brilliancy;--a triumphant and masterly composition, hidden in a
dark corner of what has now become a great dusty building, filled with
public offices.

XI.

FIESOLE.

Here sits on her hill the weird old Etrurian nurse of Florence,
withered, superannuated, feeble, warming her palsied limbs in the sun,
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. Unabl