In the closing centuries of Imperial Rome the bulk of her enemies marched against her on horseback, and her own armies came to be composed more and more of Cavalry. Her last great battle was against Attila the Hun, whose people lived on their horses. It was a victory; but it was a Cavalry victory, and won by the help of the Goths. Her Infantry had long since failed her, and the Imperial City had been herself in the hands of the Barbarians. Her fall had been due to the woeful corruption and degeneration of the legions, not to any inherent superiority of the horseman over the footman; but the fact remains that at this time Cavalry was everywhere regarded as the more important arm of the two. There followed a long period during which the predominance of the horseman grew more and more undisputed. With the collapse of Rome scientific warfare on a large scale became a lost art, and in the disorderly welter of the Dark Ages the fighting power of the footman, which depends so much upon organisation and discipline, sank lower and lower. To deal it a final blow came, a thousand years or so after Christ, the institution of Chivalry, which to a considerable extent undermined national feeling and exalted in its place the individual prowess of the Knight. Having its origin in a praiseworthy attempt to set up a higher standard of right and wrong, to resist cruelty and injustice, to honour woman as she should be honoured, and to make courage and courtesy the aim of men, it did much good, and has left to succeeding ages some noble aspirations and examples. Even now there is surely no better thing one can say of a man than that he is chivalrous--_chevaleresque_--like a knight of old. The horseman had given his name to a new social order and a splendid ideal. In practice Chivalry was not always what it should have been, but the glamour of it lies upon all our poetry and literature. Even the free-lance or the moss-trooper, unprincipled ruffian as he often was, remains to our eyes a picturesque figure. There is still a gleam on his helmet and spear that time cannot take away. The war-horse and his rider had reached in those days the climax of their power and reputation.