r, who loved the superior merit,
would have envied the death of Ellac. His brother, Dengisich, with an
army of Huns, still formidable in their flight and ruin, maintained his
ground above fifteen years on the banks of the Danube. The palace of
Attila, with the old country of Dacia, from the Carpathian hills to the
Euxine, became the seat of a new power, which was erected by Ardaric,
king of the Gepidae. The Pannonian conquests from Vienna to Sirmium, were
occupied by the Ostrogoths; and the settlements of the tribes, who had
so bravely asserted their native freedom, were irregularly distributed,
according to the measure of their respective strength. Surrounded
and oppressed by the multitude of his father's slaves, the kingdom
of Dengisich was confined to the circle of his wagons; his desperate
courage urged him to invade the Eastern empire: he fell in battle; and
his head ignominiously exposed in the Hippodrome, exhibited a grateful
spectacle to the people of Constantinople. Attila had fondly or
superstitiously believed, that Irnac, the youngest of his sons, was
destined to perpetuate the glories of his race. The character of that
prince, who attempted to moderate the rashness of his brother Dengisich,
was more suitable to the declining condition of the Huns; and Irnac,
with his subject hordes, retired into the heart of the Lesser Scythia.
They were soon overwhelmed by a torrent of new Barbarians, who followed
the same road which their own ancestors had formerly discovered. The
_Geougen_, or Avares, whose residence is assigned by the Greek writers
to the shores of the ocean, impelled the adjacent tribes; till at length
the Igours of the North, issuing from the cold Siberian regions, which
produce the most valuable furs, spread themselves over the desert, as
far as the Borysthenes and the Caspian gates; and finally extinguished
the empire of the Huns.

Such an event might contribute to the safety of the Eastern empire,
under the reign of a prince who conciliated the friendship, without
forfeiting the esteem, of the Barbarians. But the emperor of the West,
the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, who had reached his thirty-fifth
year without attaining the age of reason or courage, abused this
apparent security, to undermine the foundations of his own throne,
by the murder of the patrician AEtius. From the instinct of a base and
jealous mind, he hated the man who was universally celebrated as the
terror of the Barbarians, and