Their sensuality was unbridled, so much so that even polygamy was a licence too restrained for their depravity. The Huns were worthy sons of such fathers. The Goths, the bravest and noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their physical and moral deformity. Their voices were shrill, their gestures uncouth, and their shapes scarcely human.

They are said by a Gothic historian to have resembled brutes set up awkwardly on their hind legs, or to the misshapen figures (something like, 1 suppose, the grotesque forms of medieval sculpture), which were placed upon the bridges of antiquity. Their shoulders were broad, their noses flat, and their eyes black, small, and deeply buried in their head. They had little hair on their skulls, and no beard. The report was spread and believed by the Goths, that they were not mere men, but the detestable progeny of evil spirits and witches in the wilds of the East.

Reproductions of the ancient Scythians

As the Huns were but reproductions of the ancient Scythians, so are they reproduced themselves in various Tartar races of modem times. Tavernier, the French traveller, in the seventeenth century, gives us a similar description of the Kalmuks, some of whom at present are included in the Russian Empire. " They are robust men", he says, " but the most ugly and deformed under heaven; a face so flat and broad, that from one eye to the other is a space of five or six fingers. Their eyes are very small, the nose so flat that two small nostrils is the whole of it; knees turned out, feet turned in".

Attila himself did not degenerate in aspect from tills unlovely race; for an historian tells us, whom I have already made use of, that " his features bore the stamp of his national origin; and the portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuck; a large head, a swarthy complexion, small deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body, of nervous strength, though of a dis- proportioned form".

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