. Attila, on the evening of his new nuptials,
drank to excess, and was carried to his room. There he was found in the
morning, bathed and suffocated in his blood. An artery had suddenly
burst; and, as he lay on his back, the blood had flowed back upon his
throat and lungs, and so he had gone to his place.

5.

And now for Zingis and Timour:--like the Huns, they and their tribes
came down from the North of Asia, swept over the face of the South,
obliterated the civilization of centuries, inflicted unspeakable misery
on whole nations, and then were spent, extinguished, and only survived
to posterity in the desolation they caused. As Attila ruled from China
to the Rhine, and wasted Europe from the Black Sea to the Loire, so
Zingis and his sons and grandsons occupied a still larger portion of the
world's surface, and exercised a still more pitiless sway. Besides the
immense range of territory, from Germany to the North Pacific Ocean,
throughout which their power was felt, even if it was not acknowledged,
they overran China, Siberia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Anatolia, Syria,
and Persia. During the sixty-five years of their dominion, they subdued
almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe. The conquests of Timour
were as sudden and as complete, if not as vast, as those of Zingis; and,
if he did not penetrate into Europe, he accomplished instead the
subjugation of Hindostan.

The exploits of those warriors have the air of Eastern romance; 700,000
men marched under the standard of Zingis; and in one of his battles he
left 160,000 of his enemies upon the field. Before Timour died, he had
had twenty-seven crowns upon his head. When he invaded Turkistan, his
army stretched along a line of thirteen miles. We may conceive his
energy and determination, when we are told that, for five months, he
marched through wildernesses, subsisting his immense army on the
fortunes of the chase. In his invasion of Hindostan he had to pass over
a high chain of mountains, and, in one stage of the passage, had to be
lowered by ropes on a scaffold, down a precipice of 150 cubits in depth.
He attempted the operation five times before he got safely to the
bottom.

These two extraordinary men rivalled or exceeded Attila in their
wholesale barbarities. Attila vaunted that the grass never grew again
after his horse's hoof; so it was the boast of Zingis, that when he
destroyed a city, he did it so completely, that his horse could gallop
across its