And again:

'You are excused from making restitution of things the owner of which is uncertain, if you have made composition with the Bishop or the Pope; and also in case you are bound to restore something to the poor, and being yourself really in want, you give it to yourself-tibi ipsi eam des; and in this latter case, though you afterwards become richer, still you are not bound to make restitution.'-L. iv. 696.

Deridet, says Cicero, speaking of one of Verres' iniquitous What tricks, quum sibi ipsum jubet satisdare Rabonium. would he have said to a man stealing first and then conscientiously making restitution-to himself? But Cicero was a heathen, and had not the approbation of infallibility.

We have now shown at length the authorized teaching of Rome on two most important branches of Morals-on Truthfulness and Falsehood, and on Honesty and Stealing. We appeal to the unprejudiced conscience, if on these points she is indeed the high-principled, strict, unbending, religious moralist, which her advocates have represented her to be, when they have been dealing with earnest and enthusiastic minds, and it has therefore suited their purpose so to represent her. The theory of the English Church and of the Primitive Church, on the subject of Equivocation, we have shown to be the direct contradictory of that which she holds, inasmuch as England and Antiquity alike inculcate Truthfulness, and Rome justifies Deceit. With regard to theft we have no theory-we have a precept, Thou shalt not steal;' and the expansion of that precept by our Theologians has been for the purpose of showing how we may keep it in the spirit and in the letter, not how we may break it in the spirit while we may keep it in the letter. An- ' glican moralists do not frame definitions excluding what ought to be included, and then argue from their definitions. They do not employ their ingenuity in teaching how to lie without lying, how to steal without stealing, how to sin without sinning. On the subject of thieving, the Church herself explains in her Catechism what she understands by the Divine command, Thou shalt not steal.' The lessons which she draws from it are two, one positive and the other negative; and these she puts into the mouth of each one of her children. They are, 1. To be true and just in all my dealings. 2. To keep my hands from picking and stealing. And these two lessons are still further enforced by her Divines. Take Bishop Nicholson, for example. He writes:

Man may have a just title to somewhat which he may call his own, whether his title ariseth by just acquisition, inheritance, by gift or donation, or by contract. And it is the purpose of God here to secure suum cuique, every man in his own estate, setting a hedge and a fence about his goods

by an eternal law of commutative justice, that no man dare to break over, or rush upon, what is his, without an apparent injury and an affront done to God. This being the end, (1.) Here is communded, 1. That every man be content with his estate, and to have moderate desires. 2. To preserve

our neighbour's goods, and to suffer every man to enjoy his own quietly and fairly. 3. To give and pay every man his due, and injure no man. 4. To use justice in all our dealings, contracts, bargains. 5. To be frugal, and not to spend above our estates. 6. To use honest means to get a livelihood, viz. prayer and labour.. 7. To use our goods to benefit others justly, liberally, cheerfully. 8. That we restore what is unjustly gotten or detained. (2.) Here is forbidden, 1. Injustice, violence, oppression. 2. Covetousness, and hoarding up all that comes in. 3. Tenacity or the niggard's hand. 4. Contentiousness, and vexatious lawsuits. 5. Immoderate care and solicitude. 6. Deceit, fraud, circumvention in bargaining, contracts, buying, selling. 7. Picking and stealing, or secret purloinings. S. Open robbery, violence, plundering, and rapacity. 9. False weights and measures. 10. Sacrilege: to detain tithes, tribute, custom. 11. To borrow and not to pay again when they are able. 12. To detain hirelings' wages, cheat orphans and widows. 13. To embezzle other men's estates and fail a trust. 14. To receive bribes and to set justice to sale. 15. To break their promise, and refuse to stand to their bargains. 16. To embase and adulterate coin, and pass it for good and perfect. 17. Prodigality, to waste their own estate. 18. They who make not restitution offend. 19. To live an idle life, and not to use honest labour to live.'-Bishop Nicholson on the Catechism, p. 114.

6

We can conceive the lofty contempt with which a disciple of S. Alfonso would look down upon the simplicity which could have dictated this teaching. What? not one word about purloining not being thieving? Nothing about extreme and quasi'extreme necessity? Nothing about distressed noblemen pro'viding for themselves out of other people's goods? Nothing about robbing Turks? No reference to grave and light matter? Nothing about mortal and venial thieving? No tariff laid down to steal by? No thieving-licence given to ' wives and children? No permission of pilfering to servants ' and monks? No theory of secret compensation? Secret purloining and the use of short weights and measures absolutely forbidden? Bribes not to be received by judges? Promises not to be broken? Such is the result of Anglican negations! Thanks to Heaven that we are living where Morals have been 'studied and systematized under the humane and indulgent 'supervision of the Holy Roman Church!'

448

ART. V. Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, applied to Language and Religion. By CHEVALIER BUNSEN. London: Longmans. 1854.

In a recent article on Mr. Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria,' we engaged to revert to a special branch of Etruscan archæology-the national language, the only key to the origin of the race whenever Chevalier Bunsen's long-promised volumes should issue from the press. We cannot feel otherwise than disappointed that these learned and laborious researches have thrown no fuller and clearer light upon this mysterious enigma; a result, however, which ought to be attributed far more to the poverty of the materials to which the ethnological theory is applied, the paucity of monumental inscriptions, and the non-existence of any national literature, than to defects inherent in the Chevalier's method of investigation. Before, however, we present to the reader the results of M. Bunsen's labours, it may be well to pass briefly in review the leading speculations which have been broached upon this perplexing question, since the study of Etruscan lore first arrested the attention of the antiquarian world. This we

owe in mere courtesy to our readers, since the value of the Chevalier's contributions can only be estimated by comparison with those of others, with whose researches, in so abstruse a province of classical learning, the generality of our readers can hardly be expected to be very familiar.

One of the earliest theories, which found especial favour among the ultramontane learned, assumed the Etruscans to be originally a Transalpine race, who, descending as conquerors into the plains of the Po, had gradually pushed their settlements in a southerly direction. The idea was not destitute of ancient authority and classical countenance; it was supported by the recorded fact, that there really were, at a later period, in the Rhætian Alps, tribes speaking the Etruscan dialect. The term Rasena was brought into connexion with Rhætian,' and the Celtic and Teutonic dialects were held, for the moment, safer guides than the Egyptian or the Hebrew. The theory, however, though afterwards renewed with more success by Niebuhr and his school, did not at the time attract numerous adherents; it was succeeded, in the then prevailing rage for Oriental etymology, by the Phoenico-Egyptian delusion, which, at first, won popular opinion, though its futilities ere long caused it to be hissed off the historical arena, with much justice, as its own

authors candidly confessed. The classical theory of interpretation now became the favourite. Antecedent probability, in the absence of any positive evidence, countenanced the connexion of a primitive people of Italy with the Latins and Greeks, rather than with Arabs and Egyptians. The mischievous plausibilities of Lanzi, the pillar of this system, long proved a serious impediment to the progress of sound inquiry. He neglected the distinction between the Etruscan inscriptions proper, and those of the various conterminous tribes, Umbrians, Oscans, &c., which doubtless contain an admixture of Greek and Latin elements never hitherto discoverable in the Etruscan tongue. Various etymological expedients (lucus a non lucendo) were invoked in aid of this fallacious system; transposition, substitution, intercalation of grammatical forms, were all enlisted, and exhausted in the process. Hupitaiseke becomes, in his arbitrary vocabulary, VTоTÉ ELKE, monumentum posuit: Turke is discovered to be δώρευκε (δεδώρευκε): Tular is merely the Etruscan form of To oλλápiov: not to fatigue the reader with other illustrations, deservedly ridiculed by a clever contemporary some ten years ago, who remarked that here lieth' would give equally good Greek for ἱερὸς λίθος: • this stone' for δύστονος, &c.

The proverbial prejudices of the Italian literati soon afterwards found an eloquent advocate in Micali, who rallied all the learning of his time in support of the opinion of Dionysius, that the Etruscans were an indigenous Italian race. This doctrine was shortly afterwards attacked by Niebuhr, who recurred to the Rhætian theory of Frèret, believing the Etruscans to have been a tribe from the Rhætian Alps, who conquered the Tyrrhene Pelasgi, the earlier possessors of the land. He defended his own version of their origin by the resemblance-a resemblance, we need hardly say, palpable only to the second-sight of etymologists of the name Rasena,' which the Etruscans used to designate themselves, to 'Rhæti;' by the statements of the ancients, that the Rhætians were of Etruscan extraction; by the analogy which certain dialects now spoken in those regions bear to the Etruscan; and also by the fact that no earlier population than the Etruscan is recorded to have inhabited those mountains. The fact, however, that ancient monuments resembling the Etruscan, and inscriptions in a character very similar, have been found among the Rætian and Novic Alps, though it may in a great degree authenticate the connexion of Etruria with those regions, can only support the theory of the original extraction of the people thence, at the expense of the Roman authorities of Livy, Justin, and Pliny, who concurrently declare the Etruscan emigration to have been from the south in a northerly direction. A modification of Niebuhr's view was

held by Ottfried Müller,-that the later element in the Etruscan nation was derived from Lydia, yet composed not of natives, but of Tyrrhene Pelasgi, who had settled on the coasts of Asia Minor; and that the earlier lords of the land were the Rasena, from the mountains of Rhætia, who, driving back the Umbrians, and uniting with the Tyrrheni on the Tarquinian coast, constituted the Etruscan race.

The next champion who appeared on the lists of the archæological arena was Sir W. Betham, the late Ulster King-atarms, whose Quixotic caprices may possibly be more amusing to the reader than the dry and barren details we have hitherto been forced to record. He broached the extraordinary theory, that the Etruscans, the Phoenicians, and the old Milesians of Erin were the same people, speaking identically the same Erse; that Etruria was colonized from the east, then Ireland from Etruria. He endeavoured, by the most ludicrous devices, to substantiate this system by an analysis of the Eugubian tables, and the great Etruscan inscription of Perugia. By appeals to archaic glossaries and obsolete dialects, by capricious divisions of words and syllables, and other expedients of a despairing invention, he elicited from an examination of the first of these documents the valuable discovery that it contained, in old Erse, an account of the colonization of Ireland, with a log-book of the voyage which led to the event. The commencement of the second Eugubian table may serve as a specimen of his method: No. I. is the text according to its own subdivision of words; No. II. is Sir William's Hiberno-Punic edition; Nos. III. and IV. are his two English versions:

'I. BUKUKUM: IUBIU: PUNE: UBEF: FURFATH: TREF: BITLUF: TURUF: MARTE: THURIE: FETU: PUPLUPER: TUTAS: IIUBINAS &c.

II. Bu co com iud be i u Pune u be fa for fath tre fa bi at lu fa tur u fa mar ta tur i e fad

u pob lu bar to ta is i iud be i na is &c.

III. Was which security day and night in from Phoenician from night means defence by skill throughout the means being also water means voyage from the means as indeed the voyage in it far away people water of the sea is gentle indeed it is by wisdom day and night in it is &c.

IV. There was security, day and night, during the whole voyage to and from the river, Phoenician, from the night precautions and skill, and there being deep water in the river. By this skill in distant voyages of the people of the water to the north, is the sea indeed practicable; secure by day and night, gentle, indeed, in the sea, it is, &c.'

A clever contributor to the Quarterly Review undertook to extract out of these inscriptions, through the medium of any real language of Europe, living or dead, better sense than Sir