MRS. HAMILTON GRAY'S HISTORY OF ETRURIA. THIS second volume of
Mrs. GRAY'S History of Etruria, or more properly this account of her own reading about the ancient &rues
vans, is not equal to the first volume, either in matter or interest. This does not arise from the alleged inferiority of continuations, or any deficiency of merit in the authoress, still less of zeal. It is wholly caused by the obscurity of her subject, and the consequent paucity of her materials ; for, strange to say, there is much less of the Etruscans in the present volume than there was in its pre- decessor. This paucity is owing to two causes. Great learn- ing has been occupied in tracing, from tradition and philology, the primitive seat and the subsequent migrations of the Rasena
-till they landed in Italy : their assumed institutions were preserved by the Romans ; the extent of their empire was often incidentally -alluded to by the ancient historians; and their monuments, afford- ing many proofs of their customs and arts, have survived to this day. From these materials, in addition to her own enthusiasm and elegance of style, Mrs. GRAY was enabled to produce a volume of considerable interest, popularizing the curious and the obscure. But the general characteristics of the subject were then exhausted, and nothing more was left to tell. The present volume is not a history of Etruria—beyond the titlepage it does not even profess to be one ; but a history of Rome from its foundation under RomuLus till the sort of general peace made B.C. 348, about forty years after the capture of Rome by the Gauls. During this long period and long volume, a few pages would contain all that Mrs. GRAY can tell respecting the Etruscans ; and some even of that is of so purely -conjectural a character, that it is heralded by "we may be assured," " we may believe," "would not fail," and similar terms to justify an assumption. The few facts that can be collected are bare of cir- cumstances—the mention of a treaty or a battle, found in the story of other countries, by whose writers they were recorded, as their nation was connected with the occurrence. Even the general for- tunes of Etruria are unknown in their particulars : we are told of their power, we are told of their decline ; but hardly a specific fact to account for their ruin. There is no evidence that it was the irruptions of the Gauls ; it could not be the Romans, for they were struggling with the towns in their vicinity ; and though Mrs. GRAY ascribes it to dissension between the exclusive oligarchy standing rigidly for caste and a powerful party wishing to establish a more liberal aristocracy, we have little proof of this dissension, and no proof at all that ,it produced the effects attributed to it ; whilst the means by which the alleged result was brought about are altogether unknown.
So completely is the volume a history of Rome Etruscanized, that its epochs or divisions are Roman ; the story being first sub- divided by the reigns of the Kings, and then by events connected with the Republic, an intermediate chapter here and there giving such general account of Etruria as can be deduced or assumed. Considered as Roman history, the narratives are told as the classics have told them after tradition or family poems ; and the social, constitutional, and political views, are derived from NIEBUHR. Neither of these sections of the subject are, however, given with completeness,—that is, the book would not furnish a substitute for a Roman history. But it derives a character from two circumstances. The Etruscan is separated from the Latin element, as if any one writing a Saxon history should exhibit from the English annals the customs and institutions which are held to be of Germanic rather than of Norman origin. Besides her partialities for Etruria, Mrs. GRAY also brings to her estimate of Rome the milder morality of a modern and a woman. She prefers TARgurra the Proud to the Consuls his successors, apparently because he was of Etruscan race ; and she draws a dark picture of the patriot Jusaus BRUTUS, not only for beheading his sons, but, seemingly, for expelling the Tarquins, since she has no authority for the deeper tints with which she darkens him whenever he appears.
A FEMININE VIEW OF THE ELDER BRUTUS.
The apparently harsh treatment which Junius [Brutus] suffered [from 'Tarquin and the Etruscan patricians, whom his father had opposed] in the degradation of his house, was undoubtedly the law of nations for treason in those days, even as it is now. And it had precisely the same effect on Junius as an incapacitation which he felt to be unjust had previously bad upon Mas- tarna, and as, in a faint measure, it has upon our own Irish, somewhat simi- larly circumstanced, dispossessed by Cromwell and other English usurpers. It converted Junius into a furious patriot, and made him resolved npon acquiring supreme power, in order to overturn his oppressor, and to raise the Plebeians, now his own class, into that oppressor's place. Brutus, the agnomen of Ju- nius, means, in Oscan, "a slave," and is merely another term for " Servius," 4" the slave," "the Pleb4n," "the degraded one." Both Servius and Brutus made their degraders twit pale at the echo of the names which were thus be- stowed upon them in adorn, and kept these names as titles of honour. The Tarquinian prince was, notwithstanding his severity to the father, extremely kind to his nephew Junius. Ile brought him up with his own sons, enter- -tamed him in his own palace, and finally exalted him to a place which it was not lawful for any Plebeian to occupy. lie made him Tribunus Celerum, Master of the Royal Guard, head of the Curire, third in rank under the King; and though the Patricians felt this as an act of arbitrary power, and complained that it was done in contempt of their privileges, they suffered the appointment, because Junius had a right to it by birth, though none by law; and they may lave even in some degree exulted in it, as a noble act of liberality and forgive- ness. Brutus himself felt no gratitude, for his mind was one of dark, severe ambition; and his habitual gloom and taciturnity deceived alike the King, who thought that he could not be dangerous, and his own countrymen, who deemed that one so phlegmatic could have no pretensions to energy, talent, or
capacity. Here is the subject continued, on the celebrated condemnation of the sons for the conspiracy to restore the Tarquins.
"When his [Tarquin's] Ambassadors found that his restoration was out of the question, they either still lingered in Rome, pleading his cause, or they re- turned to it in order to take up the argument of Collatinus, and demand his property. The Senate were so convinced of the justice of this claim, that they ordered the goods of Tarquin to be valued and granted to him ; but Brutus was determined that his riches should not leave Rome, as he was sure that they *would be employed against her. The Ambassadors very quickly gave him the cause of displeasure that he wished for and sought, by plotting I sTarqui return and reinstatement with those of the Patricians, and even with tho members of the Senate who regretted his misfortunes, or who preferred him to the first Praetor, which Niebuhr believes was the case with all the Luceres. His return would indeed have been death to Brutus, Lucretius, Valerius, and all who had aided them; yet Brutue's own nearest relations were among the number of the keenest conspirators. The Aquili, a powerful noble house, and the Vitelli, his wife's family, and, what was worse than all this, even his own two grown-up sons, Titus and Tiberius, friends and companions of the young Tarquinii, were foremost among those who were resolved to overturn his au- thority; and they took an oath over the body of a human victim, in presence of Tarquin's heralds, to bring the old King back. A slave heard them, and wisely made the monstrous secret the price of his own liberty. He confided it to Valerius, head of the Titles, who next to Brutus was the most powerful and influential man in the city ; and Valerius had all the conspirators arrested and brought to trial. The young Junii would, not unnaturally, have a feeling of kindness towards a family which in their eyes had loaded their father with. honours, and whose benefits he had always returned with an unreasonable and implacable hate. But the stern and haughty father burned with irrepressible indignation when he found that his own children had dared to have an opinion differing from his own, and that they had taken part with a family which had degraded him and them. Yet we have no proof that this degradation was not perfectly just. [Have we any proof that it was ?] Russia, even now' could show her Brutuses towards her present Emperor ; and with respect to the harsh- ness and bigotry of parents towards their own children, whom they would far rather see in their graves than of a different opinion to themselves, England could show no small number also. Politics and religion in every age have had such votaries.
" Brutus is only singular in that be has been admired for his deed, because poetry has attributed to him motives for it which he never knew. Brutus had no ideas of liberty that were inconsistent with his own supreme command. This he had craved for himself, and purchased as it were, at an immense cost, from the oracle at Delphi. He succeeded Tarquin. He remained first Praetor, with the title of Rex, till his death; and the debtors and the lower people were more ground under the freedom which he established than they had ever been under the Kings ; excepting only in the matter of the great public works, which appear to have been of a calibre altogether anti-Roman, and which were never attempted under the Republic. " When the conspirators were brought out for judgment, Brutus, instead of delegating the matter to his colleague, enthroned himself on the judgment- seat, and coolly ordered the lictors to execute as traitors his own children, whilst he looked on. Then, descending in his pride and gloom, he told Valerius to spare the others if he could. Livy, who loves to paint, says, Qum inter mime tempos pater, vultusque, et as ejus spectaculo esset ; eininente animo patrio inter publicw penie ministerium.' Men may indeed have looked at him, but both Dionysius and Plutarch say that he showed not the slightest emotion. His own sons had rebelled against him, and stood up for the family he detested, and whom he had sworn to extirpate and ruin ; therefore in his eyes they deserved to die. These were his feelings ; and dark and fanatical minds, in the days of the Inquisition and of the Covenanters, have often nourished the same with full as much intensity, and have mistaken, as the Romans did, the passions of a demon for the spirituality of a saint."
It will be seen from this passage, that the manner and spirit of the woman often predominate in the composition ; and sometimes they degenerate into the waspish weakness of angry taunt, sta.-if the Romans were alive to be provoked. It is a more common defect of authors to treat of very remote periods as if they were akin to our own times ; and this prevails in Mrs. GRAY'S volume. The reader is not reminded of the dim and heroic period which is in hand by the air and spirit of the composition. Occasionally, the account of an Etruscan custom which has been preserved, carries the reader back to those primmval times ; but the true exception in spirit is the case of TARQUIN the Elder and his wife, and their family successor TARQUIN the Proud, who loom through the mist of antiquity like the giants of those days.
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