nard was exhorting him not to think any more save only of the
heavenly Jerusalem, Suger still expressed to him his regret at dying
without having succored the city which was so dear to them both.

Almost at the very moment when Suger was dying, a French council,
assembled at Beaugency, was annulling on the ground of prohibited
consanguinity, and with the tacit consent of the two persons most
concerned, the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Some
months afterwards, at Whitsuntide in the same year, Henry Plantagenet,
Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, espoused Eleanor, thus adding to his
already great possessions Poitou and Aquitaine, and becoming, in France,
a vassal more powerful than the king his suzerain. Twenty months later,
in 1154, at the death of King Stephen, Henry Plantagenet became King of
England; and thus there was a recurrence, in an aggravated form, of the
position which had been filled by William the Conqueror, and which was
the first cause of rivalry between France and England and of the
consequent struggles of considerably more than a century's duration.

Little more than a year after Suger, on the 20th of April, 1153,
St. Bernard died also. The two great men, of whom one had excited and
the other opposed the second crusade, disappeared together from the
theatre of the world. The crusade had completely failed. After a lapse
of scarce forty years, a third crusade began. When a great idea is
firmly fixed in men's minds with the twofold sanction of duty and
feeling, many generations live and die in its service before efforts are
exhausted and the end reached or abandoned.

During this forty years' interval between the end of the second and
beginning of the third crusade, the relative positions of West and East,
Christian Europe and Mussulman Asia, remained the same outwardly and
according to the general aspect of affairs; but in Syria and in Palestine
there was a continuance of the struggle between Christendom and Islamry,
with various fortunes on either side. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem
still stood; and after Godfrey de Bouillon, from 1100 to 1180, there had
been a succession of eight kings; some energetic and bold, aspiring to
extend their young dominion, others indolent and weak upon a tottering
throne. The rivalries and often the defections and treasons of the petty
Christian princes and lords who were set up at different points in
Palestine and Syria endangered their com