In August, 1820, Mr. Barry returned to England to commence his professional life. He took a small house in Ely Place, Holborn, a position of no great pretension, but one recommended by its quietness, centrality, and cheapness. There he began the struggle of life in real earnest, with little external advantages of patronage or connection. It was a great, and not a pleasant, change from the brightness of his foreign life, during the latter part of which at least he had earned a high artistic reputation, and enjoyed the society to which such a reputation is the passport. He had warm friends of his own and his future wife’s family of the middle class, but they had little power, though much will, to help him. He had attracted at Rome the notice of men of high rank and influence; from them he received much courtesy and even kindness, but their patronage brought as yet little substantial fruit. With regard to the leading members of his own profession, of Mr. Nash, the Wyatts, and Sir R. Smirke, he knew little or nothing; of Sir J. Soane he had some slight knowledge, and from him on one occasion (that of the Islington churches) I believe he received some recommendation; of his own contemporaries he knew best Mr. Cockerell and Mr. Tite, and afterwards (partly through Mr. Wolfe) Messrs. Donaldson, Angell, and Poynter--all beginning life, as he was, and struggling, with more or less of advantage, against the same obstacles. Perhaps a more serious difficulty still was the great change of architectural style in general, and of his own architectural taste in particular, which seemed likely to render valueless much of his professional study, begun when the ascendancy of the Greek style was still undisputed.