As has been already seen, in the theory and practice of the culture now popularized in England, there is a growing tendency on the part of science and art to trench upon the ground formerly occupied by literature. The fashionable vocabulary of culture is itself an instance of this. Metaphors from the palette, the scalpel, the crucible, the retort, are applied to indicate the commonest and oldest literary phenomena. Or we hear of loaded epithets, of dynamic diction, of sonatas in sentences, of fugues in periods, and of new stratifications in style. Amid all our improvements we are a little mixed, and have still to decide where the province of the writer ends and that of his brother in some other art begins. This is a transient, as it is a transitional phase. It may perhaps confuse posterity which will scarcely recognize as the same language the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the orations of Lord Leighton, the art criticisms of Steele or Addison in _The Spectator_, of Walter H. Pater, of J. A. Symonds, in _The Cornhill Magazine_, or one of the monthly Reviews. The survey of the agencies now at work upon different social levels, shows that even thus the education which comes of reading, competes at some disadvantage with the instruction that is the result of lectures in class rooms, of demonstrations in scientific 'theatres,' of days and nights spent in museums of sculpture or in galleries of paintings. During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work, was dominated by the presence of a few illustrious men, who naturally became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives, Dickens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing, especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or successors. The author of _The Newcomes_ was outlived[91] by the accomplished writer of that series which began with _Pelham_ in 1828 and neared its end with _The Parisians_ almost fifty years later.