many victories, was closing his days in the fulness of power and renown. That they themselves, the formidable Goths, should have to fear and flee, seemed the most improbable of prospects; yet it was their lot. Suddenly they heard, or rather they felt before they heard,—so rapid is the torrent of Scythian warfare,—they felt upon them and among them the resistless, crushing force of a remorseless foe. They beheld their fields and villages in flames about them, and their hearthstones deluged in the blood of their dearest and their bravest. Shocked and stunned by so unexpected a calamity, they could think of nothing better than turning their backs on the enemy, crowding to the Danube, and imploring the Romans to let them cross over, and to lodge themselves and their families in safety from the calamity which menaced them.

Indeed, the very appearance of the enemy scared them; and they shrank from him, as children before some monstrous object. It is observed of the Scythians, their ancestors, who, as I have mentioned, came down upon Asia in the Median times, that they were a frightful set of men. "The persons of the Scythians," says a living historian,[7] "naturally unsightly, were rendered hideous by indolent habits, only occasionally interrupted by violent exertions; and the same cause subjected them to disgusting diseases, in which they themselves revered the finger of Heaven." Some of these ancient tribes are said to have been cannibals, and their horrible outrage in serving up to Cyaxares human flesh for game, may be taken to confirm the account Their sensuality was unbridled, so much so that even polygamy was a licence too limited for their depravity. The Huns were worthy sons of such fathers. The Goths, the bravest and noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their physical and mental deformity. Their voices were shrill, their gestures uncouth, and their shapes scarcely human. They are said by a Gothic historian to have resembled brutes set up awkwardly on their hind legs, or to the misshapen figures (something like, I suppose, the grotesque forms of medieval sculpture), which were placed upon the bridges of antiquity. Their shoulders were broad, their noses flat, and their eyes black, small, and deeply buried in their head. They had little hair on their skulls, and no beard. The report was spread and believed by the Goths, that they were not mere men, but the detestable progeny of evil spirits and witches in the wilds of the East.

As the Huns were but reproductions of the ancient Scythians, so are they reproduced themselves in various Tartar races of modern times. Tavernier, the French traveller, in the seventeenth century, gives us a similar description of the Kalmuks, some of whom at present are included in the Russian Empire. "They are robust men," he says,[8] "but the most ugly and deformed under heaven; a face so flat and broad, that from one eye to the other is a space of five or six fingers. Their eyes are very small, the nose so flat that two small nostrils is the whole of it; their knees turned out, and their feet turned in."

Attila himself did not degenerate in aspect from this unlovely race; for an historian tells us, whom I have already made use of, that "his features bore the stamp of his national origin; and the portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuck; a large head, a swarthy complexion, small deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body, of nervous strength, though of a disproportioned form." I should add that the Tartar eyes are not only far apart, but slant inwards, as do the eyebrows, and are partly covered by the eyelid. Now Attila, this writer continues, "had a custom of rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he had inspired;" yet, strange to say, all this was so far from being thought a deformity by his people, that it even went for something supernatural, for we presently read, "the barbarian princes confessed, that they could not presume to gaze, with a steady eye, on the divine majesty of the King of the Huns."

I consider Attila to have been a pure Hun; I do not suppose the later hordes under Zingis and Timour to have been so hideous, as being the descendants of mixed marriages. Both Zingis himself and Timour had foreign mothers; as to the Turks, from even an earlier date than those conquerors, they had taken foreign captives to be mothers of their families, and had lived among foreign people. Borrowing the blood of a hundred tribes as they went on, they slowly made their way, in the course of six or seven centuries, from Turkistan to Constantinople. Then as to the Russians again, only a portion of the empire is strictly Tartar or Scythian; the greater portion is but Scythian in its first origin, many ages ago, and has long surrendered its wandering or nomad habits, its indolence, and its brutality.

3.

To return to Attila:—this extraordinary man is the only conqueror of ancient and modern times who has united in one empire the two mighty kingdoms of Eastern Scythia and Western Germany, that is, of that immense expanse of plain, which stretches across Europe and Asia. If we divide the inhabited portions of the globe into two parts, the land of civilization and the land of barbarism, we may call him the supreme and sole king of the latter, of all those populations who did not live in cities, who did not till the soil, who were hunters and shepherds, dwelling in tents, in waggons, and on horseback.[9] Imagination can hardly take in the extent of his empire. In the West he interfered with the Franks, and chastised the Burgundians, on the Rhine. On the East he even sent ambassadors to negotiate an equal alliance with the Chinese Empire. The north of Asia was the home of his race, and on the north of Europe he ascended as high as Denmark and Sweden. It is said he could bring into the field an army of 500,000 or 700,000 men.

You will ask perhaps how he gained this immense power; did he inherit it? the Russian Empire is the slow growth of centuries; had Attila a long line of royal ancestors, and was his empire, like that of Haroun, or Soliman, or Aurunzebe, the maturity and consummation of an eventful history? Nothing of the kind; it began, as it ended, with himself. The history of the Huns during the centuries immediately before him, will show us how he came by it. It seems that, till shortly before the Christian era, the Huns had a vast empire, from a date unknown, in the portion of Tartary to the east of Mount Altai. It was against these formidable invaders that the Chinese built their famous wall, 1,500 miles in length, which still exists as one of the wonders of the world. In spite of its protection, however, they were obliged to pay tribute to their fierce neighbours, until one of their emperors undertook a task which at first sight seems an exception to what I have already laid down as if a universal law in the history of northern warfare. This Chinese monarch accomplished the bold design of advancing an army as much as 700 miles into the depths of the Tartar wilderness, and thereby at length succeeded in breaking the power of the Huns. He succeeded;—but at the price of 110,000 men. He entered Tartary with an army 140,000 strong;