e wolf
(Lupus) and the lion (Leo) had learnt how to conquer him. The tide of
brutal and barbarous invasion was rolled back again, and the world and
the city saw that while the Emperor Valentinian had been ready to fly,
the Pope Leo was not afraid to advance, and that "when the successor
of Caesar had been proved useless, the successor of St. Peter had been
a very present help." Indirectly Attila was the strengthener of the
Papacy, and the founder of Venice. That stately and gorgeous city owes
its origin to the Italians who fled in terror before the brutal Huns
from ruined Padua to the islands and lagoons at the mouth of the
Piave.

In retiring, Attila had demanded once more the hand and dower of
Honoria, the disgraced sister of Theodosius II. But in 453 he added a
beautiful maiden, Ildico, to his innumerable wives. He retired from
the banquet after a deep carouse, and in the morning was found dead
amid a flood of gore by which he had been suffocated, while Ildico sat
weeping beneath her veil by the dead king's bedside. He died as a fool
dieth; and his warriors gashed their cheeks and wept tears of blood,
and gave him a splendid burial. And his name passed into legend as the
King Etzel of the Niebelungen Lied, and Alti of the Saga. But his
"loutish sons" quarrelled among themselves. The Teutons, Goths,
Gepidae, Alani, and Heruli reasserted their independence in the great
victory of Netad in Pannonia in 454; and though the Huns left their
name in Hungary, henceforth the empire of Attila became mere
"drift-wood, on its way to inevitable oblivion."

CLOVIS THE FIRST

By THOMAS WYATT, A.M.

(465-511)

[Illustration: Clovis on horse. [TN]]

The honor of having established the French monarchy and the French
nation, of having raised himself from his position as chief of a petty
and turbulent tribe to be the ruler of a powerful and permanent
kingdom, unquestionably belongs to Clovis the First, who was born in
the year 465. The multitude of petty kingdoms subsisting in Gaul at
this time, forms, says an illustrious historian, one of the greatest
difficulties in the ancient history of France. In a manuscript work,
still preserved in the King's library at Paris, it is imputed to the
disorders which prevailed after the expulsion of Childeric, father of
Clovis, when such as were sufficiently powerful took advantage of the
anarchy in which the nation was involved, to establish independent
monarchies of their own. Clovi