The terrible invaders, made wrathful and terrible by the resistance of Aquileia, streamed through the trembling cities of Venetia.  Each earlier stage in the itinerary shows a town blotted out by their truly Tartar genius for destruction.  At the distance of thirty-one miles from Aquileia stood the flourishing colony of Tulia Concordia, so named, probably, in commemoration of the universal peace which, four hundred and eighty years before, Augustus had established in the world.  Concordia was destroyed, and only an insignificant little village now remains to show where it once stood.  At another interval of thirty-one miles stood Altinum, with its white villas clustering round the curves of its lagoons, and rivalling Baiae in its luxurious charms.  Altinum was effaced as Concordia and as Aquileia.  Yet another march of thirty-two miles brought the squalid invaders to Patavium, proud of its imagined Trojan origin, and, with better reason, proud of having given birth to Livy.  Patavium, too, was levelled with the ground.  True, it has not like its sister towns remained in the nothingness to which Attila reduced it.  It is now

    “Many-domed Padua proud,”

but all its great buildings date from the Middle Ages.  Only a few broken friezes and a few inscriptions in its museum exist as memorials of the classical Patavium.

As the Huns marched on Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, all opened their gates at their approach, for the terror which they inspired was on every heart.  In these towns, and in Milan and Pavia (Ticinum), which followed their example, the Huns enjoyed doubtless to the full their wild revel of lust and spoliation, but they left the buildings unharmed, and they carried captive the inhabitants instead of murdering them.

The valley of the Po was now wasted to the heart’s content of the invaders.  Should they cross the Apennines and blot out Rome as they had blotted out Aquileia from among the cities of the world?  This was the great question that was being debated in the Hunnish camp, and, strange to say, the voices were not all for war.  Already Italy began to strike that strange awe into the hearts of her northern conquerors which so often in later ages has been her best defence.  The remembrance of Alaric, cut off by a mysterious death immediately after his capture of Rome, was present in the mind of Attila, and was frequently insisted upon by his counsellors, who seem to have had a foreboding that only while he lived would they be great and prosperous.

While this discussion was going forward in the barbarian camp, all voices were hushed, and the attention of all was aroused by the news of the arrival of an embassy from Rome.  What had been going on in that city it is not easy to ascertain.  The Emperor seems to have been dwelling there, not at Ravenna.  Aetius shows a strange lack of courage or of resource, and we find it difficult to recognize in him the victor of the Mauriac plains.  He appears to have been