9 ° 
WILLIAM ETTY. 
Florence he returned to Venice, stayed two months and then 
started for England with his precious studies, the cause of 
many disputes at the different custom-houses. However, 
British determination prevailed, and in the end the pictures 
were safely passed. After a short stay in Paris for further 
study he returned to London, and at once began a picture for 
the Academy, the “ Pandora ” already mentioned, bought by 
Sir Thomas Lawrence. In the summer of this year (1824), 
Etty made his last move in London to Buckingham Street, 
Strand. His mother went to help him, taking with her the 
niece, who for the next twenty-five years was Etty’s “ Right- 
11 and.” On October, the 29th, Etty was elected Associate of 
the Royal Academy, at the age of thirty-seven. 
He now began to work on the first of the “ Three Times 
Three ” colossal historical pictures, which it was his ambition 
to paint. It is called “ The Combat, or Woman interceding 
for the Vanquished/’ It was exhibited at the Academy, and 
universally admired. The price Etty put on it was three 
hundred guineas, at which it was bought by Martin, the 
painter. 
In the autumn of 1825, Etty after a long absence paid a 
visit to his native city, and began to show that active interest 
in the preservation of its antiquities, for which we owe him a 
great debt of gratitude, coupled with a feeling of regret that 
the example he set should not have been continuously followed. 
His indignation was first roused by hearing that the County 
had purchased Clifford’s Tower, and the beautiful site on 
which it stood, for the purpose of enlarging the prisons of the 
Castle. He at once bestirred himself in the matter, with the 
result that ‘‘the Tower was not actually pulled down, only 
stifled as it were, amid a huge and hideous array of Castellated 
prison-walls, enclosing the Castle precincts.” 
The spirit of Vandalism which thus roused the painter was 
literally rampant during the first half of the nineteenth 
century, and can scarcely be described as dormant at the 
present time. It sounds like a veritable death-roll to read of 
one relic of the past after another, “ taken down, so and so,” 
in some instances leaving no trace behind, not even preserved 
in prints; for example, the Skeldergate Postern. Truly the 
