After this ceremony, says the chronicler we have quoted, the ladies _began to dance like mummers, and to give themselves up to gaiety, in order to carry on the festival more joyously_. The details of this chivalric feast make us perceive a great change in the spirit and the manners of Europe. When we call to our minds the Council of Clermont, the preachings of Peter the Hermit and of St. Bernard, with the grave enthusiasm and the austere devotion which presided at the taking of the oaths of the early Crusaders; and when we afterwards behold the brilliant solemnities of chivalry, the half-profane and half-religious promises of the knights, in short, all the worldly spectacles amidst which a holy war was proclaimed, we can fancy ourselves transported not only into another age, but amongst new nations. The religion which had precipitated the West upon Asia had no longer an empire, unless the ladies were its interpreters. It was less piety, or the desire of obtaining heavenly crowns, than the sentiment of gallantry with which they were animated in tournaments, that brought knights beneath the standard of the cross. We likewise know that this kind of preaching produced only a transient effect upon the minds of the warriors; and that they had not any influence whatever upon the multitude. This observation must convince us of one truth, which is, that the most active and powerful motive among men will always be the spirit of religion, and that no other motive, emanating from human passions, could have excited the world like that which produced and kept up the crusades. Some pious men, however, made incredible efforts to revive the spirit of the early times of the holy wars. John Capistran, a monk of St. Francis, and Æneas Sylvius, bishop of Sienna, neglected no means that they thought would inflame the minds of the people, and reanimate religious enthusiasm. The first, who passed for a saint, travelled through the cities of Germany and Hungary, describing to the assemblies of the people, the perils of the faith, and the threats of the wicked. The second, one of the most enlightened bishops of his age, versed in Greek and Latin literature, an orator and a poet, exhorted princes to take up arms to keep off invasion from their own states, and save the Christian republic from approaching destruction.