ntence of Jordanes.]

The three Ostrogothic brethren, kings towards their own countrymen, were
subjects--almost, we might say, servants--of the wide-ruling king of the
Huns, who was now no longer one of those forgotten chiefs by whom the
conquering tribe had been first led into Europe, but ATTILA, a name of
fear to his contemporaries and long remembered in the Roman world. He,
with his brother Bleda, mounted the barbarian throne in the year 433,
and after twelve years the death of Bleda (who was perhaps murdered by
order of his brother) left Attila sole wielder of the forces which made
him the terror of the world. He dwelt in rude magnificence in a village
not far from the Danube, and his own special dominions seem to have
pretty nearly corresponded with the modern kingdom of Hungary. But he
held in leash a vast confederacy of nations--Teutonic, Sclavonic, and
what we now call Turanian,--whose territories stretched from the Rhine
to the Caucasus, and he is said to have made "the isles of the Ocean",
which expression probably denotes the islands and peninsulas of
Scandinavia, subject to his sway. Neither, however, over the Ostrogoths
nor over any of the other subject nations included in this vast dominion
are we to think of Attila's rule as an organised, all-permeating,
assimilating influence, such as was the rule of a Roman Emperor. It was
rather the influence of one great robber-chief over his freebooting
companions. The kings of the Ostrogoths and Gepidae came at certain times
to share the revelries of their lord in his great log-palace on the
Danubian plain; they received his orders to put their subjects in array
when he would ride forth to war, and woe was unto them if they failed to
stand by his side on the day of battle; but these things being done,
they probably ruled their own peoples with little interference from
their over-lord. The Teutonic members of the confederacy, notably the
Ostrogoths and the kindred tribe of Gepidae seem to have exercised upon
the court and the councils of Attila an influence not unlike that
wielded by German statesmen at the court of Russia during the last
century. The Huns, during their eighty years of contact with Europe, had
lost a little of that utter savageness which they brought with them from
the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any sense civilised, they
could in some degree appreciate the higher civilisation of their
Teutonic subjects. A Pagan himself, with scarcely any