decay of mediaevalism:

"For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
direction of which even still are hidden from us, a change from era
to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up;
old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten
centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair
earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. 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. The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence
as its insight into the depth of things. Many respectable historians
see only the outward lineaments. Froude saw the nation's heart and
soul. It was the same with the great man whose biographer Froude
became. Carlyle's faults would have been impossible in a character
mean or small. They were the defects of his qualities, those

Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,

which do not wait to appear till the last scene of life. Now that
more than twenty years have passed since the final volumes of the
Life were published, it may be said with confidence that Carlyle
owes almost as much to Froude as to his own writing