former, on the banks of the Utus and under the walls of Marcianapolis,
were fought in the extensive plains between the Danube and Mount Hæmus.
As the Romans were pressed by a victorious enemy, they gradually and
unskilfully retired toward the Chersonesus of Thrace; and that narrow
peninsula, the last extremity of the land, was marked by their third,
and irreparable, defeat.

By the destruction of this army Attila acquired the indisputable
possession of the field. From the Hellespont to Thermopylæ, and the
suburbs of Constantinople, he ravaged, without resistance and without
mercy, the provinces of Thrace and Macedonia. Heraclea and Hadrianople
might, perhaps, escape this dreadful irruption of the Huns; but the
words, the most expressive of total extirpation and erasure, are applied
to the calamities which they inflicted on seventy cities of the Eastern
Empire. Theodosius, his court, and the unwarlike people were protected
by the walls of Constantinople; but those waits had been shaken by a
recent earthquake, and the fall of fifty-eight towers had opened a large
and tremendous breach. The damage indeed was speedily repaired; but this
accident was aggravated by a superstitious fear, that heaven itself had
delivered the imperial city to the shepherds of Scythia, who were
strangers to the laws, the language, and the religion of the Romans.

In all their invasions of the civilized empires of the South, the
Scythian shepherds have been uniformly actuated by a savage and
destructive spirit. The laws of war, that restrain the exercise of
national rapine and murder, are founded on two principles of substantial
interest: the knowledge of the permanent benefits which may be obtained
by a moderate use of conquest; and a just apprehension, lest the
desolation which we inflict on the enemy's country may be retaliated on
our own. But these considerations of hope and fear are almost unknown in