and wine, and, saluting the King, begged him to taste them, which he did, without alighting from horseback, his men holding up to him the silver table on which they were placed.

Priscus then relates an anecdote of an encounter with a Greek, naturalised in the capital of Attila. Waiting at day-break to get admission to the house of Onegesis, the gates of which were shut, he saw a man whom he took to be a barbarian of the Scythian army, and who saluted him in Greek, which produced surprise on the part of Priscus, for the barbarians only cultivated the language of the Goths and the Huns, and those who had relations of commerce with the Romans, spoke Latin, but none of them spoke Greek, with the exception of the captives who took refuge in Thrace, or maritime Illyria, but the latter were easily recognisable by their ragged clothes and their rueful countenances. But this man had the look of a prosperous and wealthy Scythian. He was dressed with elegance, and, like other Asiatics, had the head shaved. On Priscus saluting him, and asking him who he was?-where he had come from?—and why he had adopted the costume of the Huns?-he answered, that he was Greek, and had established himself at the town of Viminiacum, on the Danube, where he had married a rich woman; but, at the capture of the town, he and his wealth had fallen, on the division of the spoil, to the Huns; but having afterwards valiantly served Attila in war, he had attained his liberty, married a barbarian woman, and preferred his new to his former way of life.

On the following day, Priscus went into the interior, or what we may call the hareem of the house of Attila, to carry presents to his wife Creca, by whom he had had three children. In this hareem were many edifices of wood, both carved and plain polished, and the whole architecture was according to certain proportions. Within was the wife of Attila, reclining on a soft divan, the floor covered with a carpet, a multitude of slaves forming a circle around her, and opposite her, female servants

squatted on the ground, working on coloured cloths to ornament the dresses of the Huns.

While they were at the palace, Attila himself was seen to come out with an air of gravity, gave judgment in disputed cases, and received deputations. Here the Greek ambassador encountered those of the Emperor of the West, who were come on another business, but rather as suppliants than as the representatives of an equal treating with an equal. “When we were," said Priscus, "expressing our surprise at the intractable pride of the barbarian, Romulus, a man of experience, who had been charged with several honourable missions, said, 'This pride comes from his good fortune, by which he is so puffed up, that reason has no weight with him, and that he thinks that nothing is right but what has entered into his head.""

After this, Attila invited both the Greek and Roman ambassadors to an entertainment at the ninth hour of the day, or, probably, between two and three in the afternoon, and on entering they were presented with a cup of wine which they drank before being seated. Attila occupied the centre of the apartment, reclining on a couch, behind which were steps that led up to the bed on which he slept, and which was adorned with cloths and carpets of various colours, such as the Romans and Greeks prepared for married couples. Onegesis occupied the first seat to the right of Attila, it having been arranged that the first class of guests should be arranged on the right, and the second on the left. Two of the sons of Attila being opposite Onegesis.

Attila then drank wine with the guests all round, according to their rank, to recognise which honour each rose and remained standing until he had restored it to the servant. It appears that there were other tables set out in the room for receiving three or four, or more guests, and that a great variety of dishes had been prepared and served on silver plate, but Attila himself had only a plate of wood, and he showed in every thing the same Quakerly affectation of simplicity, for while the

other guests drank out of cups of gold and silver, his cup was of wood.

After the first course, all rose and drank a bumper to the health and prosperity of Attila, and the other dishes were brought in, and towards evening, the tables being cleared, barbaric poetry was recited in praise of the victories of Attila. "Some," says Priscus, "were charmed by the verses, others were kindled by this picture of battles, tears flowed from the eyes of those whose age had extinguished their strength, and who could no longer quench their thirst for glory. After these songs came a buffoon, who produced roars of laughter by his merriment."

It appears that a Moor, who had been in favour with the brother and predecessors of Attila, had married a barbarian wife, but on his return back to the Roman Empire, Attila had sent his wife to Aetius, the Roman General, as a present, and taking advantage of the festival, the husband came to ask her back. But, it appears, that his manner, his pronunciation, and strange mixture of Hun, Latin, and Gothic words, created inextinguishable laughter. Attila being the only one who preserved his gravity, for he said and did nothing that showed the least disposition to cheerfulness, only, when his youngest son was brought to him, he looked pleasurably on him, and familiarly pinched his cheek.

In all this we perceive the northern Asiatic character, a lack of arts and letters, but not absolute barbarism, for there are necessaries, and even some of the luxuries of civilised life--wooden houses, carpets, vessels of gold and silver, rude abundant hospitality, gravity in the giver of the feast, and, by contrast, a buffoon for entertainment. The Huns, like the Avars and the Magyars, who came after them, belonged to the race now called Ugrian, the character and history of whom appear to be all cognate, and to present those features which enable us to draw a strong line of distinction and contrast between the Northern Asiatic and the Germanic races.

PATON. II.

10

CHAPTER XXI.

THE ASIATIC INUNDATIONS-GROSSWARDEIN IN THE
TURKISH PERIOD.

The division of the old world after the fall of the Roman Empire seems to be the quintessent fact to which the whole of the history of the last 1500 years is reducible. In Europe, during the middle ages, what mostly strikes us is the expansion of the Germanic element, the Frankish invasion of Gaul, the Saxon settlement of Great Britain, and the spread of the Germans into the South of Europe, and eastwards as well as northwards over a great extent of Slavonic territory.

If we look eastwards we see the immense conquests of the Ugrian and Mongol races. The Turks swallow up all the Greek empire. The Tartars possess the immense empire of China, and India is also a Tartar empire under the descendants of Timour. The Magyars, as the reader knows, were already in possession of Hungary from the ninth century, the great Moravian kingdom having been shattered to pieces by them at the battle of Presburg, in 907. The Turkish invasion of Europe was the last great wave of this Asiatic inundation, the highest point it reached being in the conquest of Hungary, in the sixteenth century; but here it stopped, for having successively submerged the Greek, Servian, and Magyar systems, it found an insurmountable Dutch dyke in the Germanic element.

Nothing could be more deplorable than the condition of Hungary during the Turkish occupation. The Pashas of Buda and Temesvar were appointed as regularly as those of any other Pashalic in the Turkish Empire. The mode of government was the same as that which always existed until the late Sultan Mahmoud commenced the reform of the empire, that is to say, a criminal code, or any guarantee for the life of any human being could scarcely be said to exist, for while the private thief or murderer met with prompt retribution, the governor, great

or small, who chose to play the thief or the murderer in order to enrich himself, could do so with perfect impunity, until the evil wrought its own cure; that is to say, until either the ill-gotten gains of the Pasha or Bey were sufficiently large to tempt the Divan to make him disgorge, or until public indignation knew no bounds, and ended in the governor's being killed in a popular tumult.

The annals of Naima give a very curious picture of what Hungary was at this period, and as it cannot be expected that he should make out Moslem government to have been worse than what it really was, we are sure what he says is not exaggerated. Nothing could have exceeded the barbarity with which the war was carried on; we hear of thousands of prisoners having their heads cut off, and the constantly recurring fact of garrisons put to the sword, not only villages but whole tracts of country purposely ravaged by the Tartars of the Crimea who formed the light troops of the Turkish army, and the Khan of which nation was summoned by his liege Sultan at every outbreak of hostility to lead his numerous horsemen into the plains of Hungary. And when we, now-adays, think of Grosswardein, Szolnok, Pesth, Gran, Comorn, and other places, as associated with "grim-visaged war," what a mere drop in the bucket of blood were the campaigns of 1848-9, when we look into the long wars of the Ottoman and Austrian emperors, of which Hungary was the field, in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries.

Every year or two, the Turkish war-trumpet sounds: its echoes are heard on the Caspian sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Adriatic. Roumelia and Anatolia send forth their armies; the Beglerbegs with their sandjaks-the janissaries of the Tartars; the Kurds and the Arnaouts throng to Belgrade; the Danube and the Theiss are covered with boats of provisions and ammunition ("which have no beginning and no end"). Three-fourths of Hungary and Transylvania seem always in the Ottoman hands, and this mighty host comes to take the other fourth, and stand