were fast taking themselves
away. There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient numbers who
were possessed of the necessary probity; and it is impossible not to
connect such a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which in those years
settled down on Elizabeth herself.

For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction
of which even still is 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 firm 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 in 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 there lies 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
cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their
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 mediaeval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a
vanished world.

The transition out of this old state is what in this book I have undertaken
to relate. As yet there were uneasy workings below the surface; but the
crust was unbroken, and the nation remained outwardly unchanged as it had
been for centuries. I have still some few features to add to my
description.

Nothing, I think, proves more surely the mutual confidence which held
together the government and the people, than the fact that all classes were
armed. Every man, as I have already said, was a soldier; and every man was
ready equipped at all times with the arms which corresponded to his rank.
By the great statute of Winchester,[65] which was repeated and expanded on
many occasions in the