rdeal of the Crusades,
had softened the character and improved the hearts of the aristocratic
order. The _Trouveres_ and _Troubadours_, singing of love and war in
strains pleasing to every class of society, helped to root out the gloomy
superstitions which, at the first Crusade, filled the minds of all those
who were able to think. Men became in consequence less exclusively under
the mental thraldom of the priesthood, and lost much of the credulity
which formerly distinguished them.

The Crusades appear never to have excited so much attention in England as
on the continent of Europe; not because the people were less fanatical
than their neighbours, but because they were occupied in matters of graver
interest. The English were suffering too severely from the recent
successful invasion of their soil, to have much sympathy to bestow upon
the distresses of people so far away as the Christians of Palestine; and
we find that they took no part in the first Crusade, and very little in
the second. Even then those who engaged in it were chiefly Norman knights
and their vassals, and not the Saxon franklins and population, who no
doubt thought, in their sorrow, as many wise men have thought since, that
charity should begin at home.

Germany was productive of more zeal in the cause, and her raw uncivilised
hordes continued to issue forth under the banners of the cross in numbers
apparently undiminished, when the enthusiasm had long been on the wane in
other countries. They were sunk at that time in a deeper slough of
barbarism than the livelier nations around them, and took, in consequence,
a longer period to free themselves from their prejudices. In fact the
second Crusade drew its chief supplies of men from that quarter, where
alone the expedition can be said to have retained any portion of
popularity.

Such was the state of mind of Europe when Pope Eugenius, moved by the
reiterated entreaties of the Christians of Syria, commissioned St. Bernard
to preach a new Crusade. St. Bernard was a man eminently qualified for the
mission. He was endowed with an eloquence of the highest order, could move
an auditory to tears, or laughter, or fury, as it pleased him, and had led
a life of such rigid and self-denying virtue, that not even calumny could
lift her finger and point it at him. He had renounced high prospects in
the Church, and contented himself with the simple abbacy of Clairvaux, in
order that he might have the leisure he desired