In 1836 Mrs Jameson was summoned to Canada by her husband, who had been appointed chancellor of the province of Toronto. He failed to meet her at New York, and she was left to make her way alone at the worst season of the year to Toronto. After six months' experiment she felt it useless to prolong a life far from all ties of family happiness and opportunities of usefulness. Before leaving, she undertook a journey to the depths of the Indian settlements in Canada; she explored Lake Huron, and saw much of emigrant and Indian life unknown to travellers, which she afterwards embodied in her _Winter Studies and Summer Rambles_. She returned to England in 1838. At this period Mrs Jameson began making careful notes of the chief private art collections in and near London. The result appeared in her _Companion to the Private Galleries_ (1842), followed in the same year by the _Handbook to the Public Galleries_. She edited the _Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters_ in 1845. In the same year she visited her friend Ottilie von Goethe. Her friendship with Lady Byron dates from about this time and lasted for some seven years; it was brought to an end apparently through Lady Byron's unreasonable temper. A volume of essays published in 1846 contains one of Mrs Jameson's best pieces of work, _The House of Titian_. In 1847 she went to Italy with her niece and subsequent biographer (_Memoirs_, 1878), Geraldine Bate (Mrs Macpherson), to collect materials for the work on which her reputation rests--her series of _Sacred and Legendary Art_. The time was ripe for such contributions to the traveller's library. The _Acta Sanctorum_ and the _Book of the Golden Legend_ had had their readers, but no one had ever pointed out the connexion between these tales and the works of Christian art. The way to these studies had been pointed out in the preface to Kugler's _Handbook of Italian Painting_ by Sir Charles Eastlake, who had intended pursuing the subject himself. Eventually he made over to Mrs Jameson the materials and references he had collected. She recognized the extent of the ground before her as a mingled sphere of poetry, history, devotion and art. She infected her readers with her own enthusiastic admiration; and, in spite of her slight technical and historical equipment, Mrs. Jameson produced a book which thoroughly deserved its great success.