Puppet Valentinian succeeded his father, puppet Honorius. In his days appeared another great portent--another comet, sweeping down out of infinite space, and back into infinite space again.--Attila and his Huns. They lay in innumerable hordes upon the Danube, until Honoria, Valentinian's sister, confined in a convent at Constantinople for some profligacy, sent her ring to Attila. He must be her champion, and deliver her. He paused a while, like Alaric before him, doubting whether to dash on Constantinople or Rome, and at last decided for Rome. But he would try Gaul first; and into Gaul he poured, with all his Tartar hordes, and with them all the Teuton tribes, who had gathered in his progress, as an avalanche gathers the snow in its course. At the great battle of Chalons, in the year 451, he fought it out: Hun, Sclav, Tartar, and Finn, backed by Teutonic Gepid and Herule, Turkling, East Goth and Lombard, against Roman and West Goth, Frank and Burgund, and the Bretons of Armorica. Wicked Aetius shewed himself that day, as always, a general and a hero--the Marlborough of his time--and conquered. Attila and his hordes rolled away eastward, and into Italy for Rome. That is the Hunnenschlacht; 'a battle,' as Jornandes calls it, 'atrox, multiplex, immane, pertinax.' Antiquity, he says, tells of nothing like it. No man who had lost that sight could say that he had seen aught worth seeing.--A fight gigantic, supernatural in vastness and horror, and the legends which still hang about the place. You may see one of them in Von Kaulbach's immortal design--the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of the Germans rising from their graves on the battle-night in every year, to fight it over again in the clouds, while the country far and wide trembles at their ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that Hunnenschlacht. Many consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of the decisive battles of the world. Not that Attila was ruined. Within the year he had swept through Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls of Rome. And there the great Pope Leo, 'the Cicero of preaching, the Homer of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,' met the wild heathen: and a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and went his way, to die a year or two after no man knows how. Over and above his innumerable wives, he took a beautiful German girl. When his people came in the morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to weep; but Etzel, the scourge of God, lay dead in a pool of gore. She said that he had burst a blood- vessel. The Teutons whispered among themselves, that like a free-born Teuton, she had slain her tyrant. One longs to know what became of her.