We have already glanced at the spectacle of Rome invaded by the Goths under Alaric: but though that invasion was a fatal blow given to the city, and the empire, it did not complete their ruin. Rome was not built, nor could it be destroyed, in a day. Forty years after it had yielded to the Goths, it beheld another enemy approaching its gates, in the person of Attila, the chief of the Huns, a tribe pre-eminently barbarous and cruel, who had forsaken their encampments in Hungary, to seek victory and spoil in the fair and fruitful provinces of the south. Yet this powerful prince, moved by the persuasion of Leo, the bishop of Rome, and, perhaps, still more by costly gifts; by the prevalence of disease among his troops; and by the superstitious presentiments of his own mind, abandoned his design of entering Rome, and gave another respite to the doomed city. Twenty-four years elapsed, and Odoacer, at the head of the Vandals--who, with the Goths, seemed to have sprung from a common origin--again inspired terror in the enfeebled Romans, took the city, dethroned the last of the emperors--who was styled Romulus Augustus, as if in mockery of the proud associations connected with those two noble names--and caused himself to be proclaimed the king of Rome. But the empire cannot be said, even then, to have completely fallen; for the barbarian rulers held the government, in commission, under the imperial successors of Constantine, who occupied the throne of the east. Scenes of conflict and desolation followed in rapid succession: the wars of Totila with Belisarius fearfully ravaged the region of Italy, and left Rome a scene of ruins; but the establishment of the exarchate of Ravenna kept up some faint shadow of the empire of Constantine, till Charlemagne was crowned king of the Romans, when the last vestiges of that great commonwealth melted away for ever.