Cockerell had long been anxious to get into Italy. There alone could he see and study an architecture in some measure applicable to modern needs, if he was ever to become a practical architect. For four years he had been studying abstract beauty, practising his hand in landscape painting, interesting himself in archæology, and generally, except for his vigour and perseverance, behaving as many a gentleman at large might have done whose place in the English world was already made for him. But he had a position to win, and in one of the most arduous of professions, for which all this unsettling life was not merely not preparing him but actually making him unfit. Since his first startling success at Ægina, he had been led on from one expedition to another, losing sight for months together, in the easy life and simple conditions which surrounded him, of the keen competition in the crush of London for which he ought to be girding himself. He had been forming a taste, but a taste in the externals and details of building only. Of composition and of planning he had seen as yet no fine example and had learnt nothing. There was nothing left for him to do in Greece. He had traversed it in all directions, seen every place of interest, and whenever there appeared a prospect of finding anything with the moderate means at his disposal, he had tried digging. Under Napoleon's continental system Italy of course was closed to Englishmen, but to Bavarians it was accessible, and Cockerell had often talked with Haller of the possibility of smuggling himself as his servant into the country under cover of his (Haller's) passport. Fortunately this was never attempted. Even if they had succeeded in passing the frontiers under Governments where every foreigner was subjected to continual espionage, the delusion would soon have been discovered. It was a boy's scheme. He had also tried to engage the good offices of Louis of Bavaria to obtain him admission as an artist, but nothing had come of it; and finally, when he heard that Lady Hester Stanhope had got leave to travel in Italy, he had applied to Lord Melville for a similar indulgence. But with the abdication of Napoleon, which took place in April 1814, the whole prospect changed. France was at once thrown open to Englishmen, and the rest of the Continent by degrees. It is not easy to discover at what precise date the kingdom of Naples and Rome became accessible, but it must have been during the summer. Western news took time to percolate into Greece, but as soon as he learnt that there was a possibility of penetrating into Italy, he had begun making preparations for doing so. And now that there was nothing left to detain him, he arranged to start with Linckh for Rome on the 15th of January, 1815. When the appointed day came, Madame Masson saw him off at the Piræus, and shed floods of tears. She was very fond of him. Two years after she writes: "Non si sa cosa è Carnovale dopo la vostra partenza."