In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.

And now it is all gone--like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge.

They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them.

Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, only before the silent figures sleeping on the tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive, and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of the middle age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world." Although Froude cared little for music, the rhythm of his sentences is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the classical reader.

That is literary artifice, though a very high form of it.