It is fortunately not possible to define with real precision the position Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema occupies in art, since happily he is still living and working among us--and long may he so live to turn out yet other scores of sun-filled joyous canvases, speaking to a weary and hard-driven generation, of vanished and more placid times, when existence was less restless and more æsthetically conceived! Nor, though he has had imitators by the dozen, is it as yet possible to determine the exact nature of the influence he has exerted upon the art of his age, for with rare exceptions these imitators have turned out frigid, lifeless works that bear the same relation to the master's style and manner as oleographs bear to original paintings. Neither is it quite possible to classify Alma Tadema's manner. A number of influences, partly extraneous, or accidental, partly the result of birth and atavism, have resulted in causing his art to be _sui generis_. If he must be classed at all, although a much younger man, he might be grouped with those artists who came to the fore on the continent soon after the upheaving epoch of 1848, men who endeavoured to revive the more intimate life of Greece and Rome upon their canvas, and who in France went by the name of neo-Greeks or Pompeists. This trend was a reaction from the older classical school that was headed by Jacques Louis David, whose productions were distinguished by a certain austere dignity of conception, by elaborate accuracy of form, but, on the other hand, were generally cold and unreal in sentiment, unpleasantly monotonous in colouring, and defective in their arrangement of light and shade. It has been most felicitously remarked, that if David may be named the Corneille of the Roman Empire, Alma Tadema may be said to be its Sardou. He has made his ancients more living, he has resuscitated them with less visible effort; he seems to have an instinctive comprehension of antiquity. His is not the Rome of Ingres, of Poussin, of grand public ceremonies, of battles, of the Forum and the rostrum, of actions that upheaved the world; he gives us instead the home life of this people, Rome such as we divine it to have been from Cicero's letters to Atticus, the life of the ancients as presented to us in the plays of Terence and Plautus. It is not mere historical painting that he aims at, indeed his art bears the same relation to history as does the anecdote to serious narrative, a lighter species which nevertheless often throws a brighter light upon the past than scores of learned tomes. And this result is largely achieved by his love of detail, which causes him to crowd his canvas with masses of those authentic bibelots which ancient and recent excavations and the aid of photography have brought within the reach of all.