nation, which consists of about two
hundred thousand families. But the valor of the Huns had extended the
narrow limits of their dominions; and their rustic chiefs, who assumed
the appellation of Tanjou, gradually became the conquerors, and the
sovereigns of a formidable empire. Towards the East, their victorious
arms were stopped only by the ocean; and the tribes, which are thinly
scattered between the Amoor and the extreme peninsula of Corea, adhered,
with reluctance, to the standard of the Huns. On the West, near the head
of the Irtish, in the valleys of Imaus, they found a more ample space,
and more numerous enemies. One of the lieutenants of the Tanjou subdued,
in a single expedition, twenty-six nations; the Igours, distinguished
above the Tartar race by the use of letters, were in the number of his
vassals; and, by the strange connection of human events, the flight of
one of those vagrant tribes recalled the victorious Parthians from the
invasion of Syria. On the side of the North, the ocean was assigned
as the limit of the power of the Huns. Without enemies to resist their
progress, or witnesses to contradict their vanity, they might securely
achieve a real, or imaginary, conquest of the frozen regions of Siberia.
The Northern Sea was fixed as the remote boundary of their empire. But
the name of that sea, on whose shores the patriot Sovou embraced the
life of a shepherd and an exile, may be transferred, with much more
probability, to the Baikal, a capacious basin, above three hundred miles
in length, which disdains the modest appellation of a lake and which
actually communicates with the seas of the North, by the long course of
the Angara, the Tongusha, and the Jenissea. The submission of so many
distant nations might flatter the pride of the Tanjou; but the valor
of the Huns could be rewarded only by the enjoyment of the wealth and
luxury of the empire of the South. In the third century before
the Christian aera, a wall of fifteen hundred miles in length was
constructed, to defend the frontiers of China against the inroads of the
Huns; but this stupendous work, which holds a conspicuous place in the
map of the world, has never contributed to the safety of an unwarlike
people. The cavalry of the Tanjou frequently consisted of two or three
hundred thousand men, formidable by the matchless dexterity with which
they managed their bows and their horses: by their hardy patience in
supporting the inclemency of the weath