own, except the city of Acre. He sent to the pope for assistance. The pope could not help him, because there was a new and much easier crusade on the point of commencing, that against the Albigeois. And then happened that most wonderful episode in all this tangled story, the Crusade of the Children, " expeditio nugatoria, expeditio derisoria." It had long been the deliberate opinion of many ecclesiastics that the misfortunes of the Christian kingdom, and the failure of so many Crusades, were due to the impure lives of the Christian soldiers. Since the First Crusade it had been the constant and laudable aim of the Church to maintain among the croisés a feeling that personal purity was the first requisite in an expedition inspired solely by religious zeal. All their efforts were vain ; laws were made, which were broken at once. Shameful punishments were threatened, of which no one took any notice. Even the camp of Saint Louis himself was filled with eveiy kind of immorality; while that of Bichard's Crusade, spite of the strictest laws, became the scene of profligacy the most unbridled. For every one Crusader, in the later expeditions, who was moved by a spirit of piety, there might be found ninety-nine who took the Cross for love of fighting, for the sake of their seigneurs, for sheer desire of change, for a release from serfdom, for getting away from the burden of wife and family, for the chance of plunder and license, and for every other unworthy excuse. Thus it was that the religious wars fostered and promoted vice; and the failure of army after army was looked on as a clear manifestation of God's wrath against the sins of the camp. This feeling was roused to its highest pitch when, in the year 1212, certain priests—Nicolas was the name of one of these mischievous madmen—went about France and Germany calling on the children to perform what the fathers, through their wickedness, had been unable to effect, promising that the sea should be dry to enable them to march across ; that the Saracens would be