And yet how exquisite in their archæological and æsthetic perfection are these accessories. No wonder that in a picture from Alma Tadema's hand we look quite as much for the marbles, the hangings, the stuffs, the mosaics, the trees, and the flowers, as for the faces of his creations. It would almost seem at times as though he had painted these accessories with even more care than he bestowed upon his men and women, as if they interested him more. Indeed, where flowers are concerned Alma Tadema seems to give to them an inner life, a very physiognomy, his flowers are inimitable, both as suggestions and as realities. Even in the choice made it is quite remarkable how there is always a peculiar fitness to the picture's theme. Is there not, for example, to note but a few instances, a tragic impress about the poppy beds in his picture of _Tarquinius Superbus_? Have not his red and pink oleanders a bloom and blush as fitting as that on the faces of the young lovers they shade? Do not the cypresses and the stone pines in his _Improvisatore_ adumbrate all the solemn mournfulness of a Roman garden? Is there not a sensual note in the prodigality of roses that inundates his _Heliogabalus_? Are they not almost arch in his _Love's Missile_, in _Shy_, to name but a few of the many pictures in which trees and flowers figure as the very embodiment of the summer of life and nature. Indeed, so exquisitely, so superbly painted are these flowers that in some of Alma Tadema's minor pictures they actually assume the upper hand, though of course unconsciously to the painter, and become the protagonists in the composition. There is one picture which he calls simply _Oleanders_, showing that he recognized himself how the flowers had impressed his imagination and gained precedence over the human beings with whom they were associated. Tadema's flowers are very poems, and had he painted nothing but these he would have been a great artist. [Illustration: SPRING.]