The buildings that are now called the Capitol stand on the centre of the mount, facing the north. They consist of three detached edifices, that occupy as many sides of a square, with a noble flight of steps in their front. The central edifice contains prisons and offices, and the others are filled with works of art. The celebrated statue of Marcus Aurelius, the only equestrian bronze statue of ancient Rome in existence, stands in the centre of the area, and, although the horse is heavy and even clumsy, according to American notions, a noble thing it is. The ease and the motion of this statue are beyond description. It may, at once, be set down as the model of all we possess of merit in these two respects. The artist may have had a model for this in some other work of art; but, certain I am, this has been a model for all we now possess. The senatorial palace, or the centre building of the modern Capitol, from which we obtain the name and uses of _our_ Capitols, is not very old, and it stands on the foundations of the ancient Tabularium, a structure that contained the table of the Roman laws, treaties, &c. The building was originally a sort of fortress, and probably obtained its name of the Capitol from its situation. We call our legislative structures Capitols, under some mistaken notion, I think, about the uses of the Roman Capitol. Let this be as it may, the Romans gave this name to _their_ hill from the circumstance of finding a head buried in it; and it might have been well had we waited until some signs of a head had appeared on our own, before we christened the edifices so ambitiously. But taste in names is not the strong point of American invention. After all, too, the American Capitol has proved the grave of divers sounding heads. I cannot stop to speak of all the objects of interest that crowd Rome, for descriptions of which you will search the more regular books; but we will descend from the Capitol Hill by the winding carriage road near the great stairs, and, riding round its base by narrow streets, for here the modern town commences in earnest, and crossing the end of the Corso, we find ourselves in a large open space, surrounded by houses, with a street around an area in the centre; which area lies several feet below the level of the streets, is paved, has a great many broken columns and other fragments scattered about it, and a noble column entire, standing at one end:—this is the Forum of Trajan.