ir inhabitants carried off to captivity.
Next he turned round to the West, and rode off with his savage horsemen
to the Rhine. He entered France, and stormed and sacked the greater part
of its cities. At Metz he involved in one promiscuous massacre priests
and children; he burned the city, so that a solitary chapel of St.
Stephen was its sole remains. At length he was signally defeated by the
Romans and Goths united at Chalons on the Marne, in a tremendous battle,
which ended in 252,000, or, as one account says, 300,000 men being left
dead on the field.

Irritated rather than humbled, as some beast of prey, by this mishap, he
turned to Italy. Crossing the Alps, he laid siege to Aquileia, at that
time one of the richest, most populous, and strongest of the cities on
the Hadriatic coast. He took it, sacked it, and so utterly destroyed it,
that the succeeding generation could scarcely trace its ruins. It is, we
know, no slight work, in toil and expense, even with all the appliances
of modern science, to raze a single fortress; yet the energy of these
wild warriors made sport of walled cities. He turned back, and passed
along through Lombardy; and, as he moved, he set fire to Padua and other
cities; he plundered Vincenza, Verona, and Bergamo; and sold to the
citizens of Milan and Pavia their lives and buildings at the price of
the surrender of their property. There were a number of minute islands
in the shallows of the extremity of the Hadriatic; and thither the
trembling inhabitants of the coast fled for refuge. Fish was for a time
their sole food, and salt, extracted from the sea, their sole
possession. Such was the origin of the city and the republic of Venice.

4.

It does not enter into my subject to tell you how this ferocious
conqueror was stayed in the course of blood and fire which was carrying
him towards Rome, by the great St. Leo, the Pope of the day, who
undertook an embassy to his camp. It was not the first embassy which the
Romans had sent to him, and their former negotiations had been
associated with circumstances which could not favourably dispose the Hun
to new overtures. It is melancholy to be obliged to confess that, on
that occasion, the contrast between barbarism and civilization had been
to the advantage of the former. The Romans, who came to Attila to treat
upon the terms of an accommodation, after various difficulties and some
insults, had found themselves at length in the Hunnish capital, in
H