He met the friends to whom he had brought introductions--Mr.Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion, and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs.
Richmond, then studying art in the regular professional way; one of them to become a celebrated portrait-painter, and the father of men of mark.
But his views on art were not theirs; he was already too independent and outspoken in praise of his own heroes, and too sick in mind and body to be patient and to learn.
They had not been a month in Rome before he took the fever.

As soon as he was recovered, they went still farther South, and loitered for a couple of months in the neighbourhood of Naples, visiting the various scenes of interest--Sorrento, Amalfi, Salerno.

The adventures of this journey are partly told in letters to Mr.Dale, and in the "Letters addressed to a College Friend." On the way to Naples he had noted and sketched the winter scene at La Riccia, which he afterwards used for a glowing passage in "Modern Painters"; and he had ventured into a village of brigands to draw such a castle as he had once imagined in his "Leoni." From Naples he wrote an account of a landslip near Giagnano, and sent it home to the Ashmolean Society.

He seemed better; they turned homewards, when suddenly he was seized with all the old symptoms worse than ever.

After another month at Rome, they travelled slowly northwards from town to town; spent ten days of May at Venice, and passed through Milan and Turin, and over the Mont Cenis to Geneva.
At last he was among the mountains again--the Alps that he loved.