Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/158

Rh shortly afterwards attached him to his court, as teacher in the higher branches of knowledge to the princes, his sons. He was occasionally also employed as ambassador.

His abundant leisure Faizí devoted to poetry. In his thirty-third year he was nominated to an office equivalent to that of Poet Laureate. Seven years later he died, never having lost the favour of Akbar, who delighted in his society and revelled in his conversation. It is said that he composed a hundred and one books. His fine library, consisting of four thousand three hundred choice manuscripts, was embodied in the imperial library.

But if Shaikh Faizí stood high in the favour of Akbar, his brother, Shaikh Abulfazl, the author of the Ain-í-Akbarí, stood still higher. Abulfazl was born near Agra the 14th January, 1551. He too, equally with his brother, profited from the broad and comprehensive teaching of the father. Nor did he fail to notice, and in his mind to resent, the ostracism and more than ostracism, to which his father was subjected on account of the opinions to which the free workings of a capacious mind forced him to incline. The effect on the boy's mind was to inculcate the value of toleration for all beliefs, whilst the pressure of circumstances stimulated him to unusual exertions in his studies. At the age of fifteen he had read works on all branches of those sciences that are based on reason and traditional testimony, and before he was twenty had begun his career as a teacher.