"In the mean while, the greater part of those who had not determined upon the journey, joked and laughed at those who were thus selling their goods for whatever they could get; and prophesied that their voyage would be miserable, and their return worse. Such was ever the language one day; but the next--suddenly seized with the same desire as the rest--those who had been most forward to mock, abandoned every thing for a few crowns, and set out with those whom they had laughed at but a day before. Who shall tell the children and the infirm that, animated with the same spirit, hastened to the war? Who shall count the old men and the young maids who hurried forward to the fight?--not with the hope of aiding, but for the crown of martyrdom to be won amid the swords of the infidels. 'You, warriors,' they cried, 'you shall vanquish by the spear and brand; but let us, at least, conquer Christ by our sufferings.' At the same time, one might see a thousand things springing from the same spirit, which were both astonishing and laughable: the poor shoeing their oxen, as we shoe horses, and harnessing them to two-wheeled carts, in which they placed their scanty provisions and their young children; and proceeding onward, while the babes, at each town or castle that they saw, demanded eagerly whether that was Jerusalem." Such is the picture presented, by an eyewitness, of the state of France after the first promulgation of the crusade; and a most extraordinary picture it is. The zeal, the enthusiasm, the fervour of the spirit, the brutal ignorance and dark barbarity of the people, are the objects that catch the eye from the mere surface; but underneath may be seen a hundred fine and latent tints which mingle in the portrait of the age. There may be found the hope of gain and the expectation of wealth in other lands, as well as the excitement of devotion; and there also may be traced the reckless, daring courage of a period when comfort was unknown, and when security was scarcely less to be expected among the swords of the Saracens, than in the fields of France and Germany. While the thirst of adventure, the master-passion of the middle ages, prompted to any change of scene and circumstances, imagination portrayed the land in view with all that adventitious splendour which none--of all the many betrayers of the human mind--so well knows how to bestow as hope. The same land, when the Jews marched towards it from the wilderness, had been represented to them as a land flowing with milk and honey,--rich in all gifts; and doubtless that inducement moved the stubborn Hebrews, as much as the command of him they had so often disobeyed. Now the very same prospect was held out to another host of men, as ignorant of what lay before them as the Jews themselves; and it may be fairly supposed that, in their case too, imaginary hopes, and all the gay phantasma of ambition, shared powerfully with religion in leading them onward to the promised land.