sgrace
for its leaders, and discouragement for all concerned.

St. Bernard, who had prophesied a result so different, fell after this
into some disrepute, and experienced, like many other prophets, the fate
of being without honour in his own country. What made the matter worse, he
could not obtain it in any other. Still, however, there were not wanting
zealous advocates to stand forward in his behalf, and stem the tide of
incredulity, which, unopposed, would have carried away his reputation. The
Bishop of Freysinghen declared that prophets were not always able to
prophesy, and that the vices of the Crusaders drew down the wrath of
heaven upon them. But the most ingenious excuse ever made for St. Bernard
is to be found in his life by Geoffroi de Clairvaux, where he
pertinaciously insists that the Crusade was not unfortunate. St. Bernard,
he says, had prophesied a happy result, and that result could not be
considered other than happy which had peopled heaven with so glorious an
army of martyrs. Geoffroi was a cunning pleader, and, no doubt, convinced
a few of the zealous; but plain people, who were not wanting even in those
days, retained their own opinion, or, what amounts to the same thing,
"were convinced against their will."

We now come to the consideration of the third Crusade, and of the causes
which rendered it necessary. The epidemic frenzy, which had been cooling
ever since the issue of the first expedition, was now extinct, or very
nearly so, and the nations of Europe looked with cold indifference upon
the armaments of their princes. But chivalry had flourished in its natural
element of war, and was now in all its glory. It continued to supply
armies for the Holy Land when the popular ranks refused to deliver up
their able-bodied swarms. Poetry, which, more than religion, inspired the
third Crusade, was then but "_caviare_ to the million," who had other
matters, of sterner import, to claim all their attention. But the knights
and their retainers listened with delight to the martial and amatory
strains of the minstrels, minnesaengers, trouveres, and troubadours, and
burned to win favour in ladies' eyes by shewing prowess in the Holy Land.
The third was truly the romantic era of the Crusades. Men fought then, not
so much for the sepulchre of Jesus, and the maintenance of a Christian
kingdom in the East, as to gain glory for themselves in the best and
almost only field where glory could be obtained. They fought, n