r in the
winter months. A writer, from whom we have just quoted, makes comparison
between Baiae and Brighton or Trouville; but in reality the fashionable
American resort of Newport has more in common with the old classical
watering-place than any modern European sea-side resort. The hot sulphur
baths on the Lucrine shore formed of course only a shallow excuse for the
annual migration of Roman fashionables to Baiae, where blue-blooded
senators and pushing plutocrats indulged in fierce social struggles for
individual pre-eminence. Yet certain of the natural warm springs had been
enclosed in splendid buildings, and were used by the luxurious citizens,
so that even to-day the Thermae of Nero (Stufe di Nerone) are pointed out
by the local guides. "Quid Nerone pejus? Quid thermis melius Neronianis?"
(what is worse than Nero? yet what more beneficent than his baths?) asks
the poet Martial, whose name will ever be bound up with the tales of
luxury and vice that are associated with this spot. Baiae in winter, Tibur
(Tivoli) in summer, the two names stand for the beau-ideal of a Roman
existence, the cynosure of every wealthy citizen.

But let us ascend out of the close and enervating air of low-lying Baiae
to the breezy heights of Misenum, which has immortalised the name of the
Trojan trumpeter whose end was mourned by the tears of pious Aeneas
himself. In gaining its summit and in gazing upon the landscape spread
around us, we have penetrated, so it seems, into the very heart of Italy:
not the Italy of Roman history, but the land of Ausonia itself, the fabled
shore that the Trojan hero sailed at his goddess-mother's bidding to
discover, when all the world was young and the high dwellers of Olympus
still condescended to take a personal interest in the affairs of favourite
mortals. Surely the vine-clad terraces of Lake Avernus, the pools of the
Lucrine and the Mare Morto, the verdure-clad hillocks lying beneath us
must conceal the true secret of the antique Tyrrhenian country, in whose
history the rise and fall of Roman power afford but one amongst many
epochs. Looking to northward, beyond the little landing-stage of
Torregaveta, we behold the heights of Cumae, that was a flourishing city
with harbour and citadel hundreds of years before a certain Romulus built
a wall of mud near the banks of Tiber and slew his brother Remus for
leaping over his handiwork. The founding of Rome is enveloped in
impenetrable clouds of legend; the buil