The revenge which Attila inflicted on this monument of
Roman vanity, was harmless and ingenious. He commanded a painter to
reverse the figures and the attitudes; and the emperors were delineated
on the same canvas, approaching in a suppliant posture to empty their
bags of tributary gold before the throne of the Scythian monarch.
The spectators must have confessed the truth and propriety of the
alteration; and were perhaps tempted to apply, on this singular
occasion, the well-known fable of the dispute between the lion and the
man.

It is a saying worthy of the ferocious pride of Attila, that the
grass never grew on the spot where his horse had trod. Yet the savage
destroyer undesignedly laid the foundation of a republic, which
revived, in the feudal state of Europe, the art and spirit of commercial
industry. The celebrated name of Venice, or Venetia, was formerly
diffused over a large and fertile province of Italy, from the confines
of Pannonia to the River Addua, and from the Po to the Rhaetian and
Julian Alps. Before the irruption of the Barbarians, fifty Venetian
cities flourished in peace and prosperity: Aquileia was placed in the
most conspicuous station: but the ancient dignity of Padua was supported
by agriculture and manufactures; and the property of five hundred
citizens, who were entitled to the equestrian rank, must have amounted,
at the strictest computation, to one million seven hundred thousand
pounds. Many families of Aquileia, Padua, and the adjacent towns, who
fled from the sword of the Huns, found a safe, though obscure, refuge
in the neighboring islands. At the extremity of the Gulf, where the
Adriatic feebly imitates the tides of the ocean, near a hundred small
islands are separated by shallow water from the continent, and protected
from the waves by several long slips of land, which admit the entrance
of vessels through some secret and narrow channels. Till the middle of
the fifth century, these remote and sequestered spots remained without
cultivation, with few inhabitants, and almost without a name. But the
manners of the Venetian fugitives, their arts and their government,
were gradually formed by their new situation; and one of the epistles
of Cassiodorus, which describes their condition about seventy years
afterwards, may be considered as the primitive monument of the republic.
The minister of Theodoric compares them, in his quaint declamatory
style, to water-fowl, who had fixed their nests o