The Lago di Garda, the Lacus Benacus of the Romans, differs from other Italian lakes in certain features that give it a well-marked peculiarity. Its northern half, like a Norwegian fjord, is a strip of water two to three miles broad, running in a nearly straight line towards the north-east, between two ranges of mountains that rise steeply in verdant slopes from its shores. This portion of the lake belongs characteristically to the mountain region. The southern half emerges from the mountains into the plains, where it widens out into a basin some ten miles broad, encircled only by comparatively low hills. This combination of mountainous and lowland surroundings (as, on a smaller scale, in the case of Loch Lomond, in Scotland) gives the lake its most distinctive feature. At its southern end it is separated from the great Lombardy plain by the gigantic semicircle of moraine-mounds which mark the end of the massive glacier that once descended from the Tyrolese Alps, filled up the basin of the lake, and reached the plain, at that time possibly covered by the sea. Another characteristic of Garda is the remarkable straightness of its trend. Standing on the low hills above the southern shore, we can look along the whole length of the lake and far up into the mountain country beyond. One result of this configuration is seen in the violent storms to which the lake is subject when the winds blow strongly from the snowy uplands in the north-east. Big waves then arise, which gain force as they are driven to the southern shore, where they fall with great violence on the shingle-beach. The lake is famous for the fury of its storms. Probably Virgil saw it in one of its tempestuous moods, for he describes it as 'heaving with billows and with a roar as of the sea.' * Near the southern margin of the lake, about three miles from the shore, a small solitary wooded island rises out of the water. From a distance it seems to stand wholly unconnected with any other land. But on a nearer view it is found to be attached to the shore by a strip of alluvial ground, so narrow in some parts as to Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens, Benace, marino?'-' Georgics,' ii, 160. In boisterous weather sea-sickness is not unknown among the passengers in the steamboats on the lake. afford hardly more than room for a roadway, and so low as to be more or less submerged when the level of the water at this end of the lake is raised by prolonged northerly gales.* This spit of land is a natural accumulation of considerable antiquity, which has served for many centuries as a means of communication between the island and the lake-shore. The island consists of a mass of pinkish limestone, and rises several hundred feet above the surface of the water, into which it descends more or less steeply on all sides. Its surface is clothed to the top with olive woods, which in spring are carpeted with violets, grape-hyacinths and the lesser periwinkle, that cast a flush of blue over the fresh herbage beneath the grey-green foliage of the prevailing trees. This island, now known as Sirmione, is undoubtedly the Sirmio of Catullus. At its northern end are some Roman ruins, popularly believed to be the remains of the poet's house; but they probably belong, to a later time, though, as they are placed on the most advantageous site for a commanding view of the lake and the mountains beyond, they may occupy the ground on which the dwelling of Catullus actually stood. From the summit of the island the eye takes in the whole wide expanse of the great southern basin of the lake and also the entire length of the northern fjord-like portion, with its little promontories on either side, far away into the blue distances of the interior; while above the nearer crests we catch glimpses of remote snowy peaks beyond. Owing to the southward prolongation of the lake outside the limits of the mountains, it is possible from Sirmione to see, on both sides, part of the southern front of the Alpine chain as it sweeps down to the great plain at its foot. To the west lie the foothills around Brescia, and far to the east those that rise to the sky-line north of Verona. The countless varieties of outline and diversities of colour in this vast panorama of high grounds afford to the beholder an inexhaustible source * It was doubtless to this twofold character that Catullus alluded when he addressed his home on the lake as 'Pæne insularum, Sirmio, insularumque †The reader will remember Tennyson's line-Then beneath the Roman ruin, where the purple flowers grow.' of pleasure, to which is often added another charm in the ethereal beauty of the multitudinous canopy of clouds that gather in ever-changing shapes above the mountains and cast their shadows of darkest blue over valley and lake and sharp-cut crest. Under the soft azure of the Italian sky and amidst the brilliance of Italian sunshine, the landscape is one to which there are few rivals in any part of the globe. That the absorbing beauty of the scenery was one of the chief attractions of the place to Catullus may surely be assumed. It could not but appeal powerfully to a mind so sensitive as his was to all that was bright and beautiful in the world around him. This appeal would be enforced by the consciousness that all this transcendent loveliness lay in his own native province, not far from his birthplace, if not also dear to him from the recollection of holidays spent here in his boyhood. But there was a feature of Sirmio which, we cannot but think, played a notable part among the charms which the place had in the eyes of Catullus. No one can attentively read his poems without observing the remarkable contrast between the tone of his allusions to the sea and seafaring and those of other Roman poets to the same subject. Whereas Horace, for example, seems to exhaust his native tongue in seeking terms of abuse to express his antipathy and disgust, Catullus utters no word of disparagement, but, on the contrary, delights to paint the beauty and grandeur of the deep, and to dwell on the pleasure he had enjoyed in sailing over its surface. His longest poem, the Peleus and Thetis,' is full of the spirit of the sea in all its moods of calm and storm. As the epithalamium of a sea-goddess, such a poem would naturally include references to the sea; but the poet displays such an exuberance of allusion and so great a variety of picturesque epithets as to indicate how much he was at home among the 'clear waves,' the 'salt depths,' the 'blue expanse of the sea,' the windy main,' the foaming surge,' and the wave lashed into white froth by the oars.'* Indeed, it would seem as if lxiv, 1-18. 'Liquidas undas,' 'Phasidos fluctus,' 'vada salsa,' 'cærula æquora,' 'ventosum æquor,' 'tortaque remigio spumis incanduit unda,' freti candenti e gurgite,' 'e gurgite cano.' All these phrases and epithets are crowded into the first eighteen lines of the poem, as if Catullus Vol. 222.-No. 442. D he found the Latin language inadequate to convey his vivid impression of the grandeur of the sea in a storm, for he coins a new word to express the continuous torrent-like roar of the waves along an exposed line of coast (fluentisono litore, lxiv, 52). Again, the sonnet on the yacht which carried him back from the East could only have been written by one who had the instincts and experience of a yachtsman, and who loved his vessel as a personal friend that had braved with him all the perils of the deep. From many other of his poems similar evidence might be given of his keen appreciation of the sea. Now the position of Sirmio—an islet, like a ship at anchor, in the midst of the largest expanse of fresh water in Cisalpine Gaul-could not but appeal to the imagination of a poet who was also a yachtsman. One is tempted to believe that it may have been by boating and sailing on this lake in his boyhood that Catullus imbibed his taste for seamanship. At his other homes in Rome, Tivoli or Verona he had no opportunity of being afloat; and one of the sources of his eagerness to get back to Sirmio probably lay in the opportunities which the place gave him of indulging in a favourite pastime. There was no such tempting field for inland aquatic sport to be had anywhere else in the country. We can hardly believe that he undertook the trouble and expense of having his trusty yacht piloted from the Adriatic Sea up into the Lacus Benacus, merely to have the gratification of dedicating it as an offering to the Dioscuri. It seems much more probable that the transportation was carried out in order that he might have the satisfaction of cruising on Benacus in his beloved eastern phasellus, with sails or oars as the weather might permit. It is clear that a considerable interval of time elapsed between the return of the vessel and the occasion when the poet described her achievements to his friends and pointed to her hulk quietly moored by the shores of the lake.* The final laying-up of the yacht and her was so full of delight in the deep, and so carried away by the prospect of writing a sea-story, that he could not restrain the exuberance of his language. The voyage is there referred to as an old story-hæc prius fuere' (iv, 25). dedication to the sailors' divinities may not have taken place until the time came when she was considered no longer seaworthy. Moreover, we can imagine that when the poet had provided in a grateful spirit that his phasellus should spend a quiet and honoured old age near his home at Sirmio, he would not fail to put in her place another craft of some sort; for the spirit of the yachtsman would impel him, as long as the state of his funds would permit, to maintain the means of being afloat and moving over the surface of his 'limpid lake.' From the way in which the southern end of the Lago di Garda extends well out of the Alpine chain, and from the position of Sirmione off the shore, the horizon visible from this place is remarkably extensive and distant in every direction save towards the north. The blue rim where skies and mountains meet' is so unobstructed and lies so far away that the sunrises and sunsets must be exceptionally well seen. We know that these times of the day were dear to Catullus, and we may believe that their glory as seen from his home here would be to him not the least of the pleasures of the place. From his 'fast-anchored isle' he would see the sun rise from behind the far-off slopes of the southern Alps north of Verona. When early astir on the lake, he might look on such a scene as he has vividly depicted in the 'Peleus and Thetis,' when the dawn mounts upward to the threshold of the wandering sun, and the morning breath of the west wind, ruffling the calm sea, urges forward the sloping waves which at first move slowly before the mild breeze, with a sound as of gentle laughter; but as the wind freshens, they wax ever more and more, and floating far away, flash back the crimson light.'* evening, from the crest of his isle he could see the sun sink beneath the distant hills above Brescia, and the Alpine peaks, one after another, lighted up with the gleam of the after-glow. The regular succession from dawn to dusk, so impressively visible from Sirmio, would now and then, for a moment, suggest a solemn thought to the poet, as in the sad but exquisitely musical verses: 'Soles occidere et redire possunt : At |