Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/12

 THE EMPEROR AKBAR

CHAPTER I

The Argument

I crave the indulgence of the reader whilst I explain as briefly as possible the plan upon which I have written this short life of the great sovereign who firmly established the Mughal dynasty in India.

The original conception of such an empire was not Akbar's own. His grandfather, Bábar, had conquered a great portion of India, but during the five years which elapsed between the conquest and his death, Bábar enjoyed but few opportunities of donning the robe of the administrator. By the rivals whom he had overthrown and by the children of the soil, Bábar was alike regarded as a conqueror, and as nothing more. A man of remarkable ability, who had spent all his life in arms, he was really an adventurer, though a brilliant adventurer, who, soaring above his contemporaries in genius, taught in the rough school of adversity, had beheld from his eyrie at Kábul the distracted condition