compact order betrayed their apprehensions, and who were equally incapable of supporting the dangers or the fatigues of a day of battle.  The doctrine of predestination, so favorable to martial virtue, was carefully inculcated by the king of the Huns, who assured his subjects that the warriors, protected by heaven, were safe and invulnerable amid the darts of the enemy, but that the unerring Fates would strike their victims in the bosom of inglorious peace.  “I myself,” continued Attila, “will throw the first javelin, and the wretch who refuses to imitate the example of his sovereign is devoted to inevitable death.”

The spirit of the barbarians was rekindled by the presence, the voice, and the example of their intrepid leader; and Attila, yielding to their impatience, immediately formed his order of battle.  At the head of his brave and faithful Huns, he occupied in person the centre of the line.  The nations subject to his empire, the Rugians, the Heruli, the Thuringians, the Franks, the Burgundians, were extended on either hand, over the ample space of the Catalaunian fields; the right wing was commanded by Ardaric, king of the Gepidae; and the three valiant brothers who reigned over the Ostrogoths were posted on the left to oppose the kindred tribes of the Visigoths.  The disposition of the allies was regulated by a different principle.  Sangiban, the faithless King of the Alani, was placed in the centre, where his motions might be strictly watched, and his treachery might be instantly punished.  Aetius assumed the command of the left, and Theodoric of the right wing; while Torismond still continued to occupy the heights which appear to have stretched on the flank, and perhaps the rear, of the Scythian army.  The nations from the Volga to the Atlantic were assembled on the plain of Chalons; but many of these nations had been divided by faction or conquest or emigration; and the appearance of similar arms and ensigns, which threatened each other, presented the image of a civil war.

The discipline and tactics of the Greeks and Romans form an interesting part of their national manners.  The attentive study of the military operations of Xenophon or Caesar or Frederic, when they are described by the same genius which conceived and executed them, may tend to improve—­if such improvement can be wished—­the art of destroying the human species.  But the battle of Chalons can only excite our curiosity by the magnitude of the object; since it was decided by the blind impetuosity of barbarians, and has been related by partial writers, whose civil or ecclesiastical profession secluded them from the knowledge of military affairs.  Cassiodorus, however, had familiarly conversed with many Gothic warriors who served in that memorable engagement; “a conflict,” as they informed him, “fierce, various, obstinate, and bloody; such as could not be paralleled either in the present or in past ages.”  The number of the slain amounted to one hundred and sixty-two thousand, or, according to another account, three hundred thousand persons; and these incredible exaggerations suppose a real and effective loss sufficient to justify the historian’s remark that whole generations may be swept away, by the madness of kings, in the space of a single hour.