on clergy business, and stayed there with Peter Fitton, a fellow priest and scholar. Something of a connoisseur, and a friend of Bellori, Fitton may have introduced Lassels to Italian art and fellow scholars in this field. Lassels became familiar with the works of Vasari, Carlo Rifoldi, and Bellori, and may indeed have met the last as well as artists such as François du Quesnoy and Gianlorenzo Bernini. He also refers in his writings to the great collector the earl of Arundel, another acquaintance of Fitton's. During this time he translated the twelfth volume of Cardinal Caesar Baronius's Annales, which was published in Paris in 1639 as The Life or the Ecclesiasticall Historie of S. Thomas Archbishope of Canterbury. The civil war confirmed Lassels's residence abroad, and by 1644 he was apparently chaplain to the self-exiled Lady Anne Brudenell, in Paris. This was where he published The Way how to Heare Masse with Profit and Devotion''' (1644, with a dedication to Lady Anne) though our knowledge of this edition depends upon a later manuscript transcript and published versions. Having already acted as travelling tutor, in the jubilee year of 1650 Lassels was asked to accompany a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury, the Lady Catherine Whetenhall, to Rome. At her death in childbirth in Padua her husband asked Lassels to write an account of their journey together. This was the first in what became a series of continuously revised manuscript accounts of Italy based on his experience of several tours with young royalist and Catholic exiles: 'The Description of Italy' of 1654, written for David Murray, Lord Balvaird, whom he was unable to accompany in person; 'The Voyage of Italy' of about 1663 (now at North Yorkshire County Record Office); and 'The Voyage of Italy' of 1664 (now at Yale University, Beinecke Library). During the late 1650s and 1660s Lassels was cited in correspondence now in the Westminster Cathedral Archives as a candidate to be Richard Smith's successor as bishop of Chalcedon. But Lassels died in September 1668 in Montpellier in his capacity as travelling tutor, during what would have been his sixth voyage to Italy, accompanying Richard, Lord Lumley, and Ralph Sheldon. He was buried in the church of the Discalced Carmelites, Montpellier, and left 100 florins to Douai College. His fellow priest Simon Wilson obtained the latest version of his Voyage manuscript, edited it (ultimately omitting those passages