The supporters of the various systems with regard to the first peopling of Etruria, of course discover the elements of the Etruscan language in that of the different nations by whom they believe it to have been colonized. Lord Monboddo, for example, deduces both the Latin and Etruscan from the old Pelasgic; which language, he asserts, was first brought into Italy by a colony of Arcadians, seventeen generations before the Trojan war. He considers the Latin as the most ancient dialect of the Greek; and he remarks, that as it came off from the original stock earlier than the Doric, or Æolic, or any other Greek dialect now known, it has more of the roughness of the primitive Hebrew, from which he believes the Pelasgic to be derived(51). Lanzi also thinks that both the Latin and Etruscan flowed from the Greek, and that the resemblance between the Etruscan and Latin was not occasioned by the derivation of the latter from the former, but was the necessary consequence of both having sprung from a common source. It certainly is not easy to discover the primary elements of the Latin or any other language; but its immediate origin may easily be traced. The inscriptions on the most ancient monuments which have been discovered, from the Alps to Calabria, shew that, from the time of the Etruscan supremacy, there was an universal language in Italy, varied, indeed, by dialects, but announcing a common origin in the inflections of words and the forms of characters. The language of the Etruscans had been so widely spread by their conquests, that it might almost be regarded as the general tongue of Italy, and the Latian, Oscan, and Sabine idioms, were in a great measure the same with the Etruscan. From these the early Latin language was chiefly formed; and what little Greek existed in its original composition came through these languages from the Pelasgic colonies, which in the remotest periods had intermixed with the Etruscans, and with the inhabitants of ancient Latium. “It is a great mistake,” says Horne Tooke, “into which the Latin etymologists have fallen, to suppose that all the Latin must be found in the Greek, for the fact is otherwise. The bulk and foundation of the Latin language is Greek; but great part of the Latin is the language of our northern ancestors grafted on the Greek; and to our northern languages the etymologist must go for that part of the Latin which the Greek will not furnish(52).” This author is correct, in affirming that all the Latin cannot be found in the Greek; but he is far in error if he mean to maintain that any part of the Latin came directly from the language of the Celts, or that their uncouth jargon was grafted on the Greek. The northern tongues, however, whether Celtic or Sclavonic, may have contributed to form those dialects of Italy which composed the original elements of the imperial language, and were exhibited in great variety of combinations for five centuries with little admixture of the Greek.