vasion which had ever menaced society; the general disinclination to those fine theologic distinctions, which rose out of the Grecian schools of philosophy; and, perhaps, the desolation by the savage Vandals of the African Churches, which were most likely to plunge hotly into such disputes, and to drag with them the rest of Latin Christendom. During the whole feud the predecessors of Leo, and Leo himself, had calmly and firmly adhered to those doctrines which were finally received as orthodox. They had acted by common consent as heads and representatives of Western Christendom, and had fully justified the unquestioning confidence of the West by their congeniality with the universal sentiment. Nor had their dignity suffered in the eyes of men by the humiliating scenes to which the great prelates of the East, the Metropolitans of Antioch, of Constantinople, and Alexandria, had been continually exposed; arraignment as heretics, as criminals, before successive Councils, deposition, expulsion from their sees, excommunication, exile, even death. The feeble interdict issued by Dioscorus against Leo might have been shaken off with silent contempt, if it had not rather suited him to treat it with indignation. Still more the Bishop of Rome had stood uncontaminated, in dignified seclusion from the wretched intrigues and bribery, the venal favour of unpopular ministers, and the trembling dependence on Imperial caprice. Every year became more and more manifest the advantage derived by the Bishop of Rome from the abandonment of Rome as the Imperial residence. The Metropolitan of Constantinople might claim, by an ecclesiastical canon, equality with the Roman Pontiff; but the one was growing up into an independent Potentate, while the other, living under the darkening shadow of Imperial pomp and power, could not but shrink into a helpless instrument of the Imperial will. The fate of the Bishop of Constantinople, his rank and his authority in the Church, even his orthodoxy, depended virtually on the decree of the Emperor. Appearing in all the controversies of the East only in the persons of his delegates, the Bishop of Rome had preserved his majesty uninsulted and unhumbled by

the degrading invectives, altercations, even personal contumelies, which had violated the sanctity of the great Eastern prelates. Even if they had not provoked, if they had borne with the most saintly patience the outrages of the popular or monkish rabble at Ephesus or Constantinople, in the general mind the holy character could not but be lowered by these debasing scenes.

Leo seemed fully to comprehend the importance and the dignity of his position. He took the most zealous interest in the whole controversy, but his activity was grave, earnest, and serious. His language to the Eastern Emperors, and especially to the Princess Pulcheria, may sound too adulatory to modern ears. The divinity of the earthly sovereign was acknowledged in terms too nearly approaching that reserved for the great divine Sovereign. This, however, must be judged with some regard to the sentiments and expressions of the age; and his deference was in language rather than in thought. Leo addresses these earthly masters with an independence of opinion, more as their equal, almost more as their master, than would have been ventured by any other subject at that time in either empire.

In the West, meantime, Leo might seem, under the sole impulse of generous self-devotion, and reliance on the majesty of religion, to assume the noblest function of the civil power, the preservation of the Empire, of Italy, of Rome itself, of Christianity, from the most tremendous enemy which had ever threatened their freedom and peace. While the Emperor Valentinian III. took refuge in Rome, and rumours spread abroad of his meditated flight, abdication, abandonment of his throne, Leo almost alone stood fearless. An embassy, of which the Bishop of Rome was no doubt considered by the general reverence of his own age, as well as by posterity, as the head and chief, arrested the terrible Attila on the frontiers of Italy, and dispersed the host of savage and but half-human Huns. Leo, to grateful Rome, might appear as the peaceful Camillus, as the unarmed Marius, repelling invaders far more fearful than the Gauls or the Cimbrians.

The terror of Europe at the invasion of the Huns

naturally and justifiably surpassed that of all former barbaric invasions. The Goths and other German tribes were familiar to the sight of the Romans; some of them had long been settled within the frontier of the empire; they were already for the most part Christian, and, to a certain extent, Romanized in their manners and habits. The Mongol race, with their hideous, misshapen, and, as they are described, scarcely human figures, their wild habits, their strange language, their unknown origin, their numbers, exaggerated no doubt by fear, and swollen by the aggregation of all the savage tribes who were compelled or eagerly crowded to join the predatory warfare, but which seemed absolutely inexhaustible; their almost unresisted career of victory, devastation, and carnage, from the remotest East till they were met by Aëtius on the field of Châlons: at the present time the vast monarchy founded by Attila, which overshadowed the whole Northern frontier of the Empire, and to which the Gothic and other Teutonic kings rendered a compulsory allegiance; their successful inroads on the Eastern Empire, even to the gates of Constantinople; the haughty and contemptuous tone in which they conducted their negotiations, had almost appalled the Roman mind into the apathy of despair. Religion, instead of rousing to a noble resistance against this heathen race, which threatened to overrun the whole of Christendom, by acquiescing in Attila's proud appellation, the Scourge of God, seemed to justify a dastardly prostration before the acknowledged emissary of the divine wrath. The spell, it is true, of Attila's ir resistible power had been broken; he had suffered a great defeat, and Gaul was, for a time at least, wrested from his dominion by the valour and generalship of Aëtius. But when, infuriated, as it might seem, more than discouraged by his discomfiture, the yet formidable Hun suddenly descended upon Italy, the whole peninsula lay defenceless before him. Aëtius, as is most probable, was unable, as his enemies afterwards declared, was traitorously unwilling, to throw himself between the barbarians and Rome. The last struggles of Roman pride, which had rejected the demand of Attila for the hand of the Princess

Honoria (his self-offered bride, whose strange adventures illustrate the degradation of the Imperial family), and which had been delayed by the obstinate resistance of Aquileia to the whole army of Attila, were crushed by the fall and utter extermination of that city, and the total subjugation of Italy as far as the banks of the Po.o Valentinian, the Emperor, fled from Ravenna to Rome. To some no doubt he might appear to seek succour at the feet of the Roman Pontiff; but the abandonment of Italy was rumoured to be his last desperate determination.

At this fearful crisis, the insatiable and victorious Hun seemed suddenly and unaccountably to pause in Invasion of his career of triumph. He stood rebuked and Attila. subdued before a peaceful embassy, of which, with the greater part of the world, the Bishop of Rome, as he held the most conspicuous station, so he received almost all the honour. The names of the rich Consular Avienus, of the Prefect of Italy, Trigetius, who ventured with Leo to confront the barbarian conqueror, were speedily forgotten; and Leo stands forth the sole preserver of Italy. On the shores of the Benacus the ambassadors encountered the fearful Attila. Overawed (as the belief was eagerly propagated, and as eagerly accepted) by the personal dignity, the venerable character, and by the religious majesty of Leo, Attila consented to receive the large dowry of the Princess Honoria, and to retire from Italy. The death of Attila in the following year, by the bursting of a blood-vessel, on the night during which he had wedded a new wife, may have been brooding, as it were, in his constitution, and somewhat subdued his fiercer energy of ambition. His army, in all probability, was weakened by its conquests, and by the uncongenial climate and unaccustomed luxuries of Italy. But religious awe may still have been the dominant feeling which enthralled the mind of Attila. The Hun, with the usual superstitiousness of the polytheist, may have trembled before the God of the stranger, whom nevertheless he did not worship. The best historian of the period relates that the

Compare Gibbon, c. xxxv. Observe the characteristic words of Jornandes:

"Dum ad aulæ decus virginitatem suam cogeretur custodire."

fate of Alaric, who had survived so short a time the conquest of Rome, was known to Attila, and seemed to have made a profound impression upon him. The dauntless A.D. 452. confidence and the venerable aspect of Leo would confirm this apprehension of encountering, as it were, in his sanctuary the God now adored by the Romans. Legend, indeed, has attributed the submission of Attila to a visible apparition of the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, who menaced the trembling heathen with a speedy divine judgment if he repelled the proposals of their successor. But this materialising view, though it may have heightened the beauty of Raffaelle's painting of Leo's meeting with Attila, by the introduction of preter-human forms, lowers the moral grandeur of the whole transaction. The simple faith in his God, which gave the Roman Pontiff courage to confront, and threw that commanding majesty over his words and actions which wrought upon the mind of the barbarian, is far more Christianly sublime than this unnecessarily-imagined miracle.

The incorrigible Romans alone, in their inextinguishable pagan superstition, or their ineradicable pagan passion for the amphitheatre, attributed the deliverance of the city not to the intercession of Leo (like the rest of the world), or to the mercy of God, but to the influence of the stars. They crowded (to his indignation) to the Circensian games, rather than to the tombs of the martyrs." Leo might save Rome from the sword of the heathen barbarian, he could not save it from the vices of the Christian sovereign, which were precipitating the Western

P Priscus, quoted by Jornandes, c. 42. "Pudet dicere, sed oportet non tacere: plus impenditur dæmoniis quam apostolis, et majorem obtinent insana spectacula frequentiam, quam beata martyria.' -S. Leon. Serm. lxxxiv. I am inclined to concur with Baronius (Annal. sub ann.) rather than with the later editors of S. Leo's works, Quesnel and the Ballerinis, in assigning the short sermon on the Octave of St. Peter to the deliverance from Attila, not to the evacuation of the city by Genseric. Ballerini's view seems impossible. The death of the Emperor Maximus (see below) took place on the 12th of June,

three days after Genseric entered the city; the sack of the city lasted fourteen days, till St. Peter's Day, the 29th; yet Ballerini would suppose that on the octave of that day the Romans were so far recovered from their consternation, danger, and ruin, as to celebrate the Circensian games at great expense, and to attend them in multitudes, which provoked the holy indignation of the bishop. The deliverance, which they ascribed to the stars, rather than to the mercy of God, can hardly have been the abandonment of the plundered and desolate city, with hundreds of the inhabitants carried away into captivity.