But pietism has gradually yielded to the claim of culture. Though one of the largest buildings which frown upon the wayfarer in Boston is a temple raised to the honour of Christian Science and Mrs Eddy, literature is clearly the most fashionable anodyne. It is at once easier and less poignant than theology: while it imparts the same sense of superiority, it suggests the same emancipation from mere world-liness. It is by lectures that Boston attempts to slake its intellectual thirst--lectures on everything and nothing. Science, literature, theology--all is put to the purpose. The enterprise of the Lowell Institute is seconded by a thousand private ventures. The patient citizens are always ready to discuss Shakespeare, except when Tennyson is the subject of the last discourse, and zoology remains attractive until it be obscured by the newest sensation in chemistry. And the appetite of Boston is unglutted and insatiable. Its folly is frankly recognised by the wise among its own citizens. Here, for instance, is the testimony of one whose sympathy with real learning is evident. "The lecture system," says he, "in its best estate an admirable educational instrument, has been subject to dreadful abuse. The unbounded appetite of the New England communities for this form of intellectual nourishment has tempted vast hordes of charlatans and pretenders to try their fortune in this profitable field. 'The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.' The pay of the lecturer has grown more exorbitant in proportion to the dilution of his mixture, until professional jokers have usurped the places once graced by philosophers and poets; and to-day the lyceums are served by a new species of broker, who ekes out the failing literary material with the better entertainment of music and play-acting."