idently on the decline and in danger of losing its preponderance. An
enterprising warrior would doubtless have followed up the defeat of the
invader by attacking him in his own country before he could recover from
the severe blow dealt him; but the aged Assyrian monarch appears to have
been content with repelling his foe, and made no effort to retaliate.
Cgaxares, the successor of the slain Median king, effected at his
leisure such arrangements as he thought necessary before repeating his
predecessor's attempt. When they were completed--perhaps in B.C. 632--he
led his troops into Assyria, defeated the Assyrian forces in the field,
and, following up his advantage, appeared before Nineveh and closely
invested the town. Nineveh would perhaps have fallen in this year; but
suddenly and unexpectedly a strange event recalled the Median monarch to
his own country, where a danger threatened him previously unknown in
Western Asia.

When at the present day we take a general survey of the world's past
history, we see that, by a species of fatality--by a law, that is, whose
workings we cannot trace--there issue from time to time out of the
frozen bosons of the North vast hordes of uncouth savages--brave,
hungry, countless--who swarm into the fairer southern regions
determinedly, irresistibly; like locusts winging their flight into a
green land. How such multitudes come to be propagated in countries where
life is with difficulty sustained, we do not know; why the impulse
suddenly seizes them to quit their old haunts and move steadily in a
given direction, we cannot say: but we see that the phenomenon is one of
constant recurrence, and we therefore now scarcely regard it as being
curious or strange at all. In Asia. Cimmerians, Scythians, Parthians,
Mongols, Turks; in Europe, Gauls, Goths, Huns, Avars, Vandals,
Burgundians, Lombards, Bulgarians, have successively illustrated the
law, and made us familiar with its operation. But there was a time in
history before the law had come into force; and its very existence must
have been then unsuspected. Even since it began to operate, it has so
often undergone prolonged suspension, that the wisest may be excused if,
under such circumstances, they cease to bear it in mind, and are as much
startled when a fresh illustration of it occurs, as if the like had
never happened before. Probably there is seldom an occasion of its
coming into play which does not take men more or less by surprise, and
riv