traits of the three daughters of the Duke of Westminster, all in white
dresses, with white hats and feathers; the delicacy of the colour being
rather injured by the red damask background. These pictures do not
possess any particular merit beyond that of being extremely good
likenesses, especially the one of the Marchioness of Ormonde. Over them
is hung a picture of a seamstress, pale and vacant-looking, with eyes red
from tears and long watchings in the night, hemming a shirt. It is meant
to illustrate Hood's familiar poem. As we look on it, a terrible
contrast strikes us between this miserable pauper-seamstress and the
three beautiful daughters of the richest duke in the world, which breaks
through any artistic reveries by its awful vividness.

The fifth picture is a profile head of a young man with delicate aquiline
nose, thoughtful oval face, and artistic, abstracted air, which will be
easily recognised as a portrait of Lord Ronald Gower, who is himself
known as an artist and sculptor. But no one would discern in these five
pictures the genius that painted the Home at Bethlehem and the portrait
of John Ruskin which is at Oxford.

Then come eight pictures by Alma Tadema, good examples of that accurate
drawing of inanimate objects which makes his pictures so real from an
antiquarian point of view, and of the sweet subtlety of colouring which
gives to them a magic all their own. One represents some Roman girls
bathing in a marble tank, and the colour of the limbs in the water is
very perfect indeed; a dainty attendant is tripping down a flight of
steps with a bundle of towels, and in the centre a great green sphinx in
bronze throws forth a shower of sparkling water for a very pretty
laughing girl, who stoops gleefully beneath it. There is a delightful
sense of coolness about the picture, and one can almost imagine that one
hears the splash of water, and the girls' chatter. It is wonderful what
a world of atmosphere and reality may be condensed into a very small
space, for this picture is only about eleven by two and a half inches.

The most ambitious of these pictures is one of Phidias Showing the Frieze
of the Parthenon to his Friends. We are supposed to be on a high
scaffolding level with the frieze, and the effect of great height
produced by glimpses of light between the planking of the floor is very
cleverly managed. But there is a want of individuality among the
connoisseurs clustered round Phidias, and