Attila himself did not degenerate in aspect from this unlovely race; for an historian tells us, whom I have already made use of, that "his features bore the stamp of his national origin; and the portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuck; a large head, a swarthy complexion, small deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body, of nervous strength, though of a disproportioned form." I should add that the Tartar eyes are not only far apart, but slant inwards, as do the eyebrows, and are partly covered by the eyelid. Now Attila, this writer continues, "had a custom of rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he had inspired;" yet, strange to say, all this was so far from being thought a deformity by his people, that it even went for something supernatural, for we presently read, "the barbarian princes confessed, that they could not presume to gaze, with a steady eye, on the divine majesty of the King of the Huns." I consider Attila to have been a pure Hun; I do not suppose the later hordes under Zingis and Timour to have been so hideous, as being the descendants of mixed marriages. Both Zingis himself and Timour had foreign mothers; as to the Turks, from even an earlier date than those conquerors, they had taken foreign captives to be mothers of their families, and had lived among foreign people. Borrowing the blood of a hundred tribes as they went on, they slowly made their way, in the course of six or seven centuries, from Turkistan to Constantinople. Then as to the Russians again, only a portion of the empire is strictly Tartar or Scythian; the greater portion is but Scythian in its first origin, many ages ago, and has long surrendered its wandering or nomad habits, its indolence, and its brutality. 3. To return to Attila:--this extraordinary man is the only conqueror of ancient and modern times who has united in one empire the two mighty kingdoms of Eastern Scythia and Western Germany, that is, of that immense expanse of plain, which stretches across Europe and Asia. If we divide the inhabited portions of the globe into two parts, the land of civilization and the land of barbarism, we may call him the supreme and sole king of the latter, of all those populations who did not live in cities, who did not till the soil, who were hunters and shepherds, dwelling in tents, in waggons, and on horseback.[9] Imagination can hardly take in the extent of his empire. In the West he interfered with the Franks, and chastised the Burgundians, on the Rhine. On the East he even sent ambassadors to negotiate an equal alliance with the Chinese Empire. The north of Asia was the home of his race, and on the north of Europe he ascended as high as Denmark and Sweden. It is said he could bring into the field an army of 500,000 or 700,000 men.