ess and horror, and
the legends which still hang about the place. You may see one of them in
Von Kaulbach's immortal design--the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of
the Germans rising from their graves on the battle-night in every year,
to fight it over again in the clouds, while the country far and wide
trembles at their ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that
Hunnenschlacht. Many consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of
the decisive battles of the world.

Not that Attila was ruined. Within the year he had swept through
Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls of
Rome. And there the great Pope Leo, 'the Cicero of preaching, the Homer
of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,' met the wild heathen: and
a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and went his way, to die
a year or two after no man knows how. Over and above his innumerable
wives, he took a beautiful German girl. When his people came in the
morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to weep; but Etzel, the scourge
of God, lay dead in a pool of gore. She said that he had burst a blood-
vessel. The Teutons whispered among themselves, that like a free-born
Teuton, she had slain her tyrant. One longs to know what became of her.

And then the hordes broke up. Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and
Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their Tartar
conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then
only by brute force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great
plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second
Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on
that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia,
into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had
streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. The battle of
Netad; that, and not Chalons, to my mind, was the saving battle of
Europe.

So Rome was saved; but only for a few years. Puppet Valentinian rewarded
Aetius for saving Rome, by stabbing with his own hand in his own palace,
the hero of Chalons; and then went on to fill up the cup of his iniquity.
It is all more like some horrible romance than sober history. Neglecting
his own wife Eudoxia, he took it into his wicked head to ravish her
intimate friend, the wife of a senator. Maximus stabbed him, retaliated
on the beautiful empress, and made himself Emperor