All are agreed that he was of very ordinary appearance; one says "ignoble and vulgar." The sum of the statements of contemporaries as to his personality, is that he was of sharp understanding, energetic, decided; coarse and sometimes brutal; enthusiastic; of great imaginative power. If a Picard, then a Frank, and if a Frank, then a fighter, and very ready to fight for religion. His nationality, therefore, gave him access by speech to a most restless, gallant, and adventurous people. Born with courage, moral intensity, restlessness, and activity, he experimented for satisfaction in every direction. [Sidenote: _Chooses Hermit's Life_] [Sidenote: _Effect of Self-confidence_] It seems that neither celibacy nor marriage, study nor warfare, long attracted him. The conditions about him seemed beyond his remedy, and, like many others, he retired from a sinful world to the harshnesses and austerity of a hermit's life. Fasting did for him what it seems to do for all when excess is reached either by self-will or necessity. He became truly a "visionary." "He saw visions and dreamed dreams." His temperament and his religious exercises made him feel that, better than others he knew the will of God and that he was chosen to execute it. In this stage a man becomes capable of great things in a poor cause. The world is always impressed by the confident and the courageous. No great movement, however wrong in doctrine, defective in morals, or disastrous in results, has been without such leadership. Like all orators of the Latin race, his fervor showed itself, not only in his tones, but in his gesticulation and his postures. He was a master of pantomime. If any were beyond his voice, they were not beyond his meaning. If he had lived in our time he would have been counted among the most "magnetic" of preachers. The reputation of his sanctity showered him with gifts. He kept nothing for himself. All went to the poor, and evil women were dowried by him that they might cease from evil in honorable marriage. [Sidenote: _Generosity Self-Sacrifice_] Peter was not stirred alone by the relations of returning pilgrims as to the ignominies heaped alike on the sacred places and on the religious by the Turks. He followed in the wake of the devotees who traversed the long road to the Holy City. That Peter actually made this journey is sufficiently attested by his contemporary, Anna Conmena. She probably met him while tarrying in Constantinople, and could easily know of his presence at the palace of her father, Alexius. From her we learn that he had to flee before the Turks and Saracens, and her narration makes it doubtful if he reached Jerusalem on his first attempt. By so much as he was more enthusiastic than others by nature, by so much was he fired with indignation, which to him was but the just expression of his zeal and his piety. [Sidenote: _Emotions in Jerusalem_]