“According to their national custom, the barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors. The remains of Attila were enclosed within three coffins,――of gold, of silver, and of iron,――and were privately buried in the night. The spoils of nations were thrown into his grave. The captives who had opened the ground were inhumanly massacred; and the same Huns who had indulged such excessive grief, feasted, with dissolute and intemperate mirth, about the recent sepulchre of their king.” Valentinian inveigled a noble lady, alike illustrious for beauty and piety, to his palace, where he treated her with such indignities as to rouse to the highest pitch the wrath of her husband and friends. A conspiracy was formed by her husband Maximus, a Roman senator; and Valentinian died beneath the daggers which his crimes had unsheathed. The solders placed the diadem upon the brow of Maximus. His wife soon after died; and he endeavored to compel Eudoxia, the widow of Valentinian, to become his spouse. She recoiled from throwing herself into the arms of the murderer of her husband, and appealed for aid to Genseric, one of those powerful Vandal kings who had wrested Africa from the Roman empire. Genseric joyfully espoused her cause. With a large fleet he entered the Tiber, advanced to Rome, and captured the city. In the struggle, Maximus was slain, and unhappy Rome was surrendered to the Moors and the Vandals to be pillaged for fourteen days. The barbarian Genseric carried back into the wilds of Africa, as slaves, Eudoxia, the widowed Empress of Rome, and her two daughters. Many other Roman matrons and maidens swelled the long train of captives who were dragged into life-long bondage. “Eudoxia,” writes Gibbon, “was rudely stripped of her jewels; and the unfortunate empress, with her two daughters, the only surviving remains of the great Theodosius, was compelled as a captive to follow the haughty Vandal, who immediately hoisted sail, and returned, with a prosperous navigation, to the port of Carthage. Many thousand Romans of both sexes, chosen for some useful or agreeable qualifications, reluctantly embarked on board the fleet of Genseric; and their distress was aggravated by the unfeeling barbarians, who, in the division of the booty, separated the wives from their husbands, and the children from their parents.” The whole world seemed to be now essentially in the condition of a city surrendered to the mob. There was no stable government anywhere. There was nowhere peace or prosperity or joy. Man’s corruption had filled the earth with misery. Still there were thousands of individual Christians, in obscurity and through much tribulation, struggling nobly to their throne and their crown in heaven.