it was created for pleasure only.

To the south lies a fertile plain with easy roads for the
transport of provisions; on the north, a lake sixty miles long
abounding in fish, soothing the mind with delicious
recreation.... Rightly is it called Como, because it is adorned
with such gifts. The lake lies in a shell-like valley with white
margins. Above rises a diadem of lofty mountains, their slopes
studded with bright villas; a girdle of olives below, vineyards
above, while a crest of thick chestnut woods adorns the very
summit of the hills. Streams of snowy clearness dash from the
hill-sides into the lake. On the eastern side these unite to form
the river Addua, so called because it contains the added volume
of two streams.... So delightful a region makes men delicate and
averse to labour.... Therefore the inhabitants deserve special
consideration, and for this reason we wish them to enjoy
perpetually the royal bounty.

This shews, beyond dispute, that the taste for the beauty of Nature,
even at that wild time, was not dead, and that the writer's attitude
was not mainly utilitarian. He noted the fertility of the land in
wine and grain, and of the sea in fish, but he laid far greater
stress upon its charms and their influence upon the inhabitants.

On _a priori_ grounds (so misleading in questions of this kind) one
would scarcely expect the most disturbed period in the history of the
European people to have produced a Venantius Fortunatus, the greatest
and most celebrated poet of the sixth century. His whole personality,
as well as his poetry, shewed the blending of heathenism and
Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, and it is only now and then