What he had seen of the Continent had given him a desire to see more of it, and the bias of his youthful studies pointed in the same direction. In 1765, after a short stay in France, he went into Italy, and there he passed almost eight years. They were passed in a very different way from that in which he had passed the interval between Douay and Towneley. That long residence abroad enabled him to become a very conspicuous benefactor to his country. He visited Naples, Florence, and Rome, and from time to time made many excursions into various parts of Magna Græcia and of Sicily. At Naples he formed the acquaintance of Sir William HAMILTON and of D’HANCARVILLE. [Sidenote: TOWNELEY’S ARTISTIC RESEARCHES IN ITALY.] [Sidenote: 1765–1778.] At Rome he became acquainted with three Englishmen, James BYRES, Gavin HAMILTON, and Thomas JENKINS, all of whom had first gone thither as artists, and step by step had come to be almost exclusively engrossed in the search after works of ancient art. The success and fame of Sir William HAMILTON’S researches in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and of those, still earlier, of Thomas COKE of Holkham (afterwards Earl of Leicester), had given a strong impulse to like researches in other parts of Italy. TOWNELEY caught the contagion, and was backed by large resources to aid him in the pursuit. His first important purchase was made in 1768. It was that of a work already famous, and which for more than a century had been one of the ornaments of the Barberini Palace at Rome. This statue of a boy playing at the game of tali, or ‘osselets’ (figured in _Ancient Marbles in the British Museum_, part ii, plate 31), was found among the ruins of the Baths of Titus, during the Pontificate of URBAN THE EIGHTH. During the same year, 1768, Mr. TOWNELEY acquired, from the Collection of Victor AMADEI, at Rome, the circular urn with figures in high relief—which is figured in the first volume of Piranesi’s _Raccolta di Vasi Antichi_—and also the statue of a _Nymph of Diana_, seated on the ground. This statue was found in 1766 at the Villa Verospi in Rome. [Sidenote: FORMATION OF THE TOWNELEY GALLERY.] Two years afterwards, several important acquisitions were made of marbles which were discovered in the course of the excavations undertaken by BYRES, Gavin HAMILTON, and JENKINS, amidst the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli. The joint-stock system, by means of which the diggings were effected, no less than the conditions which accompanied the papal concessions that authorised them, necessitated a wide diffusion of the spoil. But whenever the making of a desirable acquisition rested merely upon liberality of purse or a just discrimination of merit, Mr. TOWNELEY was not easily outstripped in the quest. Amongst these additions of 1769–71 were the noble Head of _Hercules_, the Head said, conjecturally, to be that of _Menelaus_, and the ‘_Castor_’ in low relief (all of which are figured in the second part of _Ancient Marbles_).