Of the many transformations wrought by Victorian science, not the least;--unscientific people might think it the greatest--is the assimilation of the idiom of fiction to that of the text books of the schools. The entire ethos of our oral diction not less than our literature has been revolutionized by science. When a parliamentary speaker illustrates his argument by a metaphor, it is not, as his forerunners once did, to the Latin and Greek classics, or even to literature at all, but to the laboratory, to the dissecting room, or to the crucible that he most frequently goes for his _trope_. The similes of the Attic masterpieces are taken habitually from those operations with which their naval empire familiarized the Athenian mind. Nor can these metaphors be understood without some remembrance of the processes which marine affairs involve. A similar acquaintance with the later operations of science is scarcely less useful for a proper appreciation of the most characteristic beauties of Victorian prose, by whatever master displayed. This dispossession of the literary by the scientific is universal. Following unconsciously perhaps the example of a great statesman, those who have in our day most widely differed from him on national affairs, a Randolph Churchill, or a Charles Stewart Parnell have reproduced the taste of a Salisbury in finding their recreations, not in the _belles lettres_ that were congenial to the day of a Pitt or a Canning, but in the researches that a Tyndall, a Huxley, a Thomson, have popularized.
Galileo's astronomical views found a useful ally by the incisive raillery of his literary style. The admirable prose of a Huxley and his fellow labourers has been no less effective for popularizing scientific studies with the public they have addressed. The social urbanity with which Nature and training have endowed Sir John Lubbock has prepossessed not a few on his own level in life in favour of those branches of physical enquiry that have enabled him to rehabilitate the moral character of the autumnal wasp.
The revolution in the conditions of English music--effected since its first encouragement by the Victorian Court--illustrated by a contrast between the social status of the musician to-day, and forty years ago. Music always a tradition of the present dynasty. Handel. English machinery for teaching music instituted under the Georgian era, and perfected under the Victorian. Has English organization for musical teaching outstripped English capacity for learning? Certain reforms approved by high musical experts. Other individual agencies than those of the Court favourable to Music during this century. Mendelssohn; his encouragement of John Parry, the forerunner of Corney Grain, and Arthur Cecil. Sir Charles Hallé, Herr Joachim, Grove, Sullivan. Anglo-German ladies. Crystal Palace Concerts.