once under
the taper's fitful light. Raised on a rude basement, the body of the
monument figures the entrance to a vault; in the centre, painted in
colours that have nearly faded, appears a doorway, within the threshold
of which four female figures gaze wistfully upon the outer world; on
either side two winged genii, their brows girt with the never-failing
Etruscan serpents, but wholly free from the quaintness of early Etruscan
treatment, sit cross-legged, watching, torch in hand, the gate from
which no living man returns. Roughly as they are hewn, it would be
difficult to surpass the stateliness of their aspect or the art with
which they are designed; Roman gravity, but quickened with Etruscan
fire, invests them: ... and our thoughts are irresistibly carried
forward to the supreme sculptor whom the Tuscan land was one day to
bear."

From Etruria, we pass naturally on to Rome; for, as we are significantly
reminded, "The Romans lay, until the tide of Greek Art broke on them
after the fall of Syracuse, wholly under the influence of the
Etruscans.... Etruria gave them kings, augurs, doctors, mimes,
musicians, boxers, runners; the royal purple, the royal sceptre, the
fasces, the curule chair, the Lydian flute, the straight trumpet, and
the curved trumpet. The education of a Roman youth received its
finishing touches in Etruria: Tuscan engineers had girt Rome with walls;
Tuscan engineers had built the great conduit through which the swamp,
which was one day to be the Forum, was drained into the Tiber. What
wonder, then, that in architecture, also in painting, in sculpture, in
jewellery, and in all the things of taste, Etruscans gave the law to the
ruder and less cultured race?"

This influence lasted, until the counter-current of Greece found an
inlet to Roman life, filtering "through Campania into Rome from the
opposite end of the peninsula." And then, from the fall of Syracuse, and
the bringing of its spoils to Rome, we find a perfect craze for Grecian
marbles, bronzes, pictures, gems, inflaming the magnates, nobles, and
_nouveaux riches_ of Rome. How fortunate that influence was in another
field, that of literature, we know. In plastic art, by reason of the
essentially inartistic spirit of the Roman race, the result was
practically small; save indeed in one department, that of portraiture,
to which the essential impulse was, as Leighton very suggestively shows,
"ethic, not aesthetic." Even in Roman architecture, our cr