Ancient coins throw much light upon Roman art. They make us feel the reality of great events connected with the rise and fall of the empire more vividly than any written records. The annual coinage, bearing the names and portraits of leading personages, indeed, formed the most legible and enduring "state gazette," continued without interruption from Pacuvius, B.C. 200, who was an artist as well as poet, down to the fifth century. In this department of Roman art, as in every other, the progress of growth, decline, and decay, is distinctly marked. The last coins, like the last temples, statues, and pictures, foretokening Gothic art, were as marked features of transition, as those which were stamped on Grecian genius as it migrated into Rome. Starting from the heart of the Etruscan nation, which was partly of an oriental derivation, art in the Augustan age ran through its second cycle, correspondant to that of the Periclean, showing that the evolution which in Greece had been illustrated in consummate statues, was strictly normal, and the same which in Etruria, at the outset, dawned in drawings upon vases. The strong influence which Assyria had thrown over some parts of Lydia, in Asia Minor, was carried far west by the Etruscans, who quitted that district and settled in the north-west of Italy. They were celebrated workers in clay and bronze; and the ornaments and figures wrought by them on these materials are identical with the figures upon the bronze bowls and plates recently discovered by Mr. Layard at Nineveh. The Etruscans were well acquainted with agriculture, as well as many other practical arts, and knew how to work the iron of Elba. Thus it was that Providence placed the formative element of the Augustan age at the right time and in the right place to execute its mission under the wisdom of a divine intent.