orld
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 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."
Froude was once asked what was the greatest and most essential quality of
an historian. He replied that it was imagination. It was a true and a just
saying, and Froude himself possessed the faculty in abundance.

It was not only with the old order that Froude showed his sympathy. He is
seldom ungenerous in his references to individual Catholics, however
mistaken in his sight their opinions may have been. With Wolsey and Warham,
Fisher and More, even with Gardiner and Bonner he deals fairly and with
some amount of real sympathy. The heroic death of Campian moves him to pity
just as much as the death of Latimer; the strenuous labours of Father
Parsons to overthrow Elizabeth and Protestantism failed to remove him
beyond the pale of Froude's charitable judgment. One English Catholic alone
was reserved for the historian's harsh and sometimes petulant criticism.
For Cardinal Pole Froude felt the angriest contempt. He was descended from
the blood royal, both of England and of Wales. On his father's side he was
descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his mother's
from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most learned and
illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in King Henry's
favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the state. He was not
without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he had--the favour of
his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved,