Vespasian and his son Titus cumbered the city, and astonished the world by such masses of building in amphitheatres and baths as will probably never again be reared. The Coliseum, so named, according to some, from its gigantic dimensions, but in the more probable opinion of others, from its proximity to a colossal statue of Nero, is said to have seated 109,000 persons at one time, to view at their ease the bloody sports of the arena. The probability of this astonishing fact will appear not only from its enormous height and great number of ascending stages, but especially from the fact that it covers nearly six acres of ground. As the Pantheon was the type of the first half of the Augustan age, so does the Coliseum represent the later period, and was a fit arena for the degenerate progeny of a brute. It is the best type of the Roman style, containing at once all its beauties and defects. In size and splendor, it comported with the empire at its culminating height, and the purpose for which it was built rendered it the favorite building of the metropolitan city in the days of its greatest glory. Even now its ruins appear as eternal as the Roman name, and present us a more adequate picture of the times in which they stood unimpaired than the pages of Livy or Tacitus. Despite our better judgment, they awe us into admiration of the greatness of that martial people, though, in fact, few buildings were ever more tasteless in design, or more faulty in execution. Standing within that immense fabric, one cannot but feel that Rome, as mistress of the world, with unlimited wealth and power, and a proud feeling of conscious pre-eminence, beyond all other nations had the greatest means of cultivating the liberal arts. On the foundation laid in Greece, she might have built models of usefulness for the world to a boundless extent; but, as it was, she only altered what she had neither the capacity nor disposition to improve, and advanced only in the path of degradation till the lowest depth was reached.