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ORESTES and ELECTRA making votive offerings at the TOMB of AGAMEMNON

as represented upon an Athenian terra cotta Vase, in the style of painting called MONOCHROMA.

Published Nov 11815. by Tiadell & W. Davies, Strand. London.

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T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, STRAND, LONDON,

BY R. WATTS, BROXBOURN, HERTS.

MDCCCXVI.

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IN publishing all that remains to complete the SECOND PART of these Travels, the author has the satisfaction of making some addition to his former remarks, upon certain antiquities which appear to him likely to illustrate, in a very remarkable manner, the customs, and the religion, and the language of ANTIENT GReece.

Ever since the first notice of the characters of the Greek alphabet upon the terra-cotta vases, found in the sepulchres of the south of Italy, decided the fact of their Hellenic origin, a hope had been entertained, that new and copious sources of information, touching the arts and literature of Greece, would be brought to light by researches

among

among the tombs of the mother country. Nearly half a century, however, elapsed, from the time that this expectation was originally excited, without any considerable discovery being made tending towards its fulfilment. Above twenty years ago, the author was at Naples with his friend the late Sir William Hamilton, who had long indulged this expectation, when the return of two English gentlemen, Messrs. Berners and Tilson, from their travels in Greece, (who brought with them terra-cotta vases similar to those called Etruscan, but which they had derived from sepulchres in Græcia Propria,) tended greatly to its fulfilment. These, and other vases, discovered by Englishmen travelling in Greece, or by their agents living at Athens, have been occasionally discovered; but they were principally vessels of libation, or small pateras and cups, with little or no ornament, excepting a plain black varnish, or, at the most, a few lines hastily scratched with a sharp instrument upon their surfaces, or traced in colour by way of cincture or border. Nothing that could be considered as fair specimens of Grecian painting, nor any inscriptions, appeared upon those terra-cottas. What the result of the author's own researches in Græcia Propria was, may be seen by reference to the account he has published in the former Section, and especially in the Sixteenth Chapter, to which an engraving is annexed, representing the principal terra-cottas therein described':

yet

(1) See the Plate facing p. 664 of that Section.

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