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The Huns were masters of the great river: their navigation was performed in large canoes, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree; the ministers of Theodosius were safely landed on the opposite bank; and their Barbarian associates immediately hastened to the camp of Attila, which was equally prepared for the amusements of hunting or of war.

The original form would then be that Hagen was slain by a king of "Hunaland", then because history relates that the Burgundians were slain by the Huns, the similarity of the names led to the introduction of Attila and the identification of the Nibelungs with the Burgundians.

The blind partiality of fraternal love might excuse the promotion of his brother Peter, who fled with equal disgrace from the Barbarians, from his own soldiers and from the inhabitants of a Roman city. That city, if we may credit the resemblance of name and character, was the famous Azimuntium, which had alone repelled the tempest of Attila.

From the Rhine and the Moselle, Attila advanced into the heart of Gaul; crossed the Seine at Auxerre; and, after a long and laborious march, fixed his camp under the walls of Orleans.

Cæsar, Alaric, Attila, Charlemagne, and all the great military men from the greatest antiquity down to the present moment have trained and organized bodies of soldiers and sailors, under systems suited to the times, and then waged successful war on peoples less militarily efficient.

Attila, though aware of the treachery and of the traitor, had received the Roman ambassadors, as a barbarian indeed, but as a king; and with that strange mixture of rudeness and magnificence of which I shall have, as I proceed, to give more detailed specimens.

Their rational criticism can no longer be amused with a vain pedigree of Attila and the Huns; but they complain that their primitive records have perished in the Tartar war; that the truth or fiction of their rustic songs is long since forgotten; and that the fragments of a rude chronicle must be painfully reconciled with the contemporary though foreign intelligence of the imperial geographer.

He Is Repulsed By Ætius And The Visigoths. Attila Invades And Evacuates Italy. The Deaths Of Attila, Ætius, And Valentinian The Third. It was the opinion of Marcian, that war should be avoided, as long as it is possible to preserve a secure and honorable peace; but it was likewise his opinion, that peace cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.

We may imagine, therefore, with what terror in this, the twelve- hundredth year after the foundation of Rome, the inhabitants of the Roman empire must have heard the tidings that the royal brethren, Attila and Bleda, had founded a new capitol on the Danube, which was designed to rule over the ancient capitol on the Tiber; and that Attila, like Romulus, had consecrated the foundations of his new city by murdering his brother; so that, for the new cycle of centuries then about to commence, dominion had been bought from the gloomy spirits of destiny in favour of the Hun, by a sacrifice of equal awe and value with that which had formerly obtained it for the Romans.

But the unusual despondency, which seemed to prevail among the Huns, engaged Attila to use the expedient, so familiar to the generals of antiquity, of animating his troops by a military oration; and his language was that of a king, who had often fought and conquered at their head. He pressed them to consider their past glory, their actual danger, and their future hopes.