I should add that the Tartar eyes are not only far apart, but slant inwards, as do the eyebrows, and are partly covered by the eyelid. Now Attila, this writer continues, " had a custom of rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired"; yet, strange to say, all this was so far from being thought a deformity by his people, that it even went for something supernatural, for we presently read, " the barbarian princes confessed, that they could not presume to gaze, with a steady eye, on the divine majesty of the King of the Huns".

I consider Attila to have been a pure Hun; I do not suppose the later hordes under Zingis and Timour to have been so hideous, as being the descendants of mixed marriages. Both Zingis himself and Timour had foreign mothers; as to the Turks, from even an earlier date than those conquerors, they had taken foreign captives to be mothers of their families and had lived among foieign people. Borrowing the blood of an hundred tribes as they went on, they slowly made their way, in the course of six or seven centuries, from Turkistan to Constantinople.

Portion of the Empire

Then as to the Russians again, only a portion of the Empire are strictly Tartar or Scythian; the greater portion are but Scythian in their first origin, many ages ago, and have long surrendered their wandering or nomad habits, their indolence, and (I suppose) their brutality.

To return to Attila: this extraordinary man is the only conqueror of ancient and modern times, who has united in one empire the two mighty kingdoms of Eastern Scythia and Western Germany, that is, of that immense expanse of plain, which stretches across Europe and Asia. If we divide the inhabited portions of the globe into two parts, the land of civilization and the land of barbarism, we may call him the supreme and sole king of the latter, of all those populations, who did not live in cities, who did not till the soil, who were hunters and shepherds, dwelling in tents, in waggons, and on horseback.

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