fragment of the art, and even of the common life, of those vanished generations.  If the day shall come when some future people shall yet once again build their city on this same eternal site, and some future social cataclysm shall have overwhelmed the works and civilization of the present time, those future builders will not find walls constructed in great part of the fragments of statues and the richly-carved friezes of yet older builders and artists, as we have found.  The Romans of the present day are, it must be admitted, fully alive to the inappreciable value of the wondrous heritage they possess in this kind; and every fragment of it is carefully and jealously gathered and stored.  And hence is the need of a new museum, and hence will be the need of other new museums—­who shall say how many?  For truly this Roman soil seems inexhaustible in buried treasures.  There seems no likelihood that the vein should be exhausted or die out.  Every now and then the excavators come upon “a fault,” as the miners say, but the vein is soon struck again.

And so the new museum at the Capitol has been rendered necessary.  It was inaugurated on the 25th of February in this year.  It consists of twelve rooms or galleries, part of which occupy the site of the apartments which used to contain the archives, now moved to other quarters, and part, including a large octagonal hall, the principal feature of the new museum, have been newly constructed on ground which used to be the garden of the Conservatori, the ancient municipal officers of the city, so called.  The entrance is by the main staircase of the palazzo of the Conservatori, which is the building that forms the side of the square of the Capitol to the right hand of the visitor as he ascends the magnificent flight of steps from the Via di Ara Coeli.  The steep sides of the Capitoline Hill on either side of these steps has been recently turned into a very well-kept and pretty garden, among the lawns and shrubberies of which the attention of the stranger, as he ascends, may be attracted by a neatly-painted iron cage in front of the mouth of a little cavern in the rock, which is inhabited by a she-wolf in memorial of the earliest traditions of the place.  Memorials, indeed, are not wanting at every step, and from the first window of the staircase as the visitor ascends to the museum on the first floor he may look down on the Tarpeian Rock.

The public functionaries of all sorts here do so much of their work in a manner which gives rise to much discontentment among the Romans, and would by the people of better-ruled countries be deemed wholly intolerable, that it is a pleasure to be able to say that upon this occasion the municipality has done what it had to do thoroughly well.  The galleries and rooms of the new establishment are decorated in admirably good taste in the Pompeian style, the walls being colored in panels and borders of blue and red on a buff ground.  They are excellently well lighted,