away eastward, and into Italy for Rome.

That is the Hunnenschlacht; 'a battle,' as Jornandes calls it,
'atrox, multiplex, immane, pertinax.' Antiquity, he says, tells of
nothing like it. No man who had lost that sight could say that he
had seen aught worth seeing.--A fight gigantic, supernatural in
vastness and horror, and the legends which still hang about the
place. You may see one of them in Von Kaulbach's immortal design--
the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of the Germans rising from
their graves on the battle-night in every year, to fight it over
again in the clouds, while the country far and wide trembles at their
ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that Hunnenschlacht. Many
consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of the decisive
battles of the world.

Not that Attila was ruined. Within the year he had swept through
Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls
of Rome. And there the great Pope Leo, 'the Cicero of preaching, the
Homer of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,' met the wild
heathen: and a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and
went his way, to die a year or two after no man knows how. Over and
above his innumerable wives, he took a beautiful German girl. When
his people came in the morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to
weep; but Etzel, the scourge of God, lay dead in a pool of gore. She
said that he had burst a blood-vessel. The Teutons whispered among
themselves, that like a free-born Teuton, she had slain her tyrant.
One longs to know what became of her.

And then the hordes broke up. Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and
Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their