at 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 s