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viii of details referring to those facts by the writers of the standard histories of India is very difficult to account for.

Some of my friends, indeed, who read a portion of this book in the pages of the Calcutta Review, have not hesitated to tell me that they regard as unpatriotic the attempt of an Englishman to search out and record events which may contrast favourably a rival nation with his own. But history is either a record of events which have happened or it is romance. If it assume to be a record of events which have happened it must record the evil as well as the good, misfortune as well as gain, defeat as well as victory. No one will dispute this broad axiom. But, to take a narrower view, it may with confidence be affirmed that the truly patriotic writer is he who does not attempt to hide the shortcomings of his own countrymen or the virtues of their enemies. It is the writer who attempts to lessen the merits of the enemy who is really guilty of want of patriotism. For, if the enemy were as contemptible as he is often described to have been by the purely insular writer, the merits of those who conquered him need not have been very considerable.

In attempting then to restore a suppressed chapter