Attila the Hun, to whom we have alluded, with an innumerable horde of the ferocious warriors, invaded Italy, everywhere perpetrating atrocious acts of cruelty. The barbarians massacred their prisoners, inflicting upon them inhuman tortures, apparently from the mere love of cruelty. Two hundred beautiful young maidens were exposed to every cruelty which savage ingenuity could devise. Their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses, and their mutilated limbs left unburied. Attila overran the rich plains of Lombardy, and established himself in the palace of Milan. The senate of Rome, terror-stricken, sent an embassage to implore peace of the barbarian. Attila demanded the Princess Honoria, daughter of the Emperor Valentinian, for his bride, and one-half of the kingdom of Italy as her dowry. While negotiations were pending, and Honoria was trembling in anticipation of her dreadful doom, the fierce Hun ravaged large portions of Gaul and Italy at the head of half a million of warriors as fierce and merciless as wolves. The victorious Hun retired to the wilds of the North to replenish his diminished hordes, threatening to return and inflict still more signal vengeance, unless the bride he demanded, and the dowry claimed with her, were immediately granted him. In the mean time, he added to his harem of innumerable wives a beautiful maiden named Idaho. “Their marriage,” writes Gibbon, “was celebrated with barbarian pomp and festivity at his wooden palace beyond the Danube; and the monarch, oppressed with wine and sleep, retired at a late hour from the banquet to the nuptial-couch. His attendants continued to respect his pleasures or his repose the greater part of the ensuing day, till the unusual silence alarmed their fears and suspicions; and, after attempting to awaken Attila by loud and repeated cries, they at length broke into the royal apartment. They found the trembling bride sitting by the bedside, hiding her face with her veil, and lamenting her own danger, as well as the death of the king, who had expired during the night. An artery had suddenly burst; and, as Attila lay in a supine posture, he was suffocated by a torrent of blood, which, instead of finding a passage through the nostrils, regurgitated into the lungs and stomach. His body was solemnly exposed in the midst of the plain under a silken pavilion; and the chosen squadrons of the Huns, wheeling around in measured evolutions, chanted a funeral-song in memory of a hero glorious in his life, invincible in his death, the father of his people, and the terror of the world.