in their return, the territories of
the Franks; and it was perhaps in this war that they exercised the
cruelties which, about fourscore years afterward, were revenged by the
son of Clovis. They massacred their hostages, as well as their captives:
two hundred young maidens were tortured with exquisite and unrelenting
rage; their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses or their bones were
crushed under the weight of rolling wagons, and their unburied limbs
were abandoned on the public roads as a prey to dogs and vultures. Such
were those savage ancestors whose imaginary virtues have sometimes
excited the praise and envy of civilized ages!

FOOTNOTES:

[24] In the _Nibelungenlied_, the old poet who describes the reception
of the heroine Chrimhild by Attila [Etsel], says that Attila's dominions
were so vast that among his subject warriors there were Russian, Greek,
Wallachian, Polish, _and even Danish knights_.

[25] If I seem to have given fewer of the details of the battle itself
than its importance would warrant, my excuse must be that Gibbon has
enriched our language with a description of it too long for quotation
and too splendidly for rivalry. I have not, however, taken altogether
the same view of it that he has.

FOUNDATION OF VENICE

A.D. 452

THOMAS HODGKIN JOHN RUSKIN

The foundation of Venice (Venetia) is an incident in the history of
Attila's incursions, at the head of his Huns, into Italy after his
defeat at the battle of Chalons-sur-Marne. Venetia was then a large
and fertile province of Northern Italy, and fifty Venetian cities
flourished in peace and safety under the protection of the Empire.
After Attila's remorseless hordes had taken and destroyed Aquileia,
near the head of the Adriatic, they swept, with resistless fury,
through Venetia, whose cities were so utterly destroyed that their
very sites could henceforth scarcely be identified. The inhabitants
fled in large numbers to the shores of the Adriatic, where, at the
extremity of the gulf, a group of a hundred islets is separated by
shallows from the mainland of Italy. Here the Venetians built their
city on what had hitherto been uncultivated and almost uninhabited
sand-banks. Under such unfavorable circumstances was started the
career of that wonderful city which afterward became "Queen of the
Adriatic" and mother of art, science, and learning.

The t