'Miss Ritchie was staying at Farringford when we came back from our foreign [Italian] travels. To her he [Tennyson] dwelt with more pleasure on the row to Desenzano than on almost anything else, and on the associations of Sirmione with Catullus. The long July twlight had at last died away whilst he talked of all he had been seeing, and lights were brought, and I fetched him a volume of Catullus. 'He made Miss Ritchie, who was no Latin scholar, follow the words as he read through some of his favourite poems. His finger moved from word to word, and he dwelt with intense satisfaction on the adequacy of the expression and of the sounds, on the mastery of the proper handling of quantity, and on the perfection of the art.'