Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/279

 BABAK'S SON HUMAYUN 225 would bury himself in his harem and dream away the precious hours in the opium-eater's paradise while his enemies were thundering at the gate. Naturally kind, he forgave when he should have punished; light-hearted and sociable, he revelled at the table when he ought to have been in the saddle. His character attracts but never dominates. In private life he might have been a delightful companion and a staunch friend; his vir- tues were Christian, and his whole life was that of a gentleman. But as a king he was a failure. His name means " fortunate," and never was an unlucky sover- eign more miscalled. The qualities most essential at the time of his acces- sion were a firm grasp of the military situation and resolution to meet it. It was a position that called for boundless energy and soldierly genius. Babar, as we have seen, had not conquered Hindustan; he had only reduced to partial submission a territory comprising little more than what we should now call the Pan jab and Northwest Provinces. He had not annexed Ben- gal to the east, nor the great provinces of Malwa and G-ujarat, now united under one king, to the south. The many chiefs of Rajputana were only cowed, not sub- dued, and in most of the outlying parts of the kingdom the Moghul power was but slightly recognized. Nu- merous Afghan officers still held powerful fiefs, and these men had not forgotten that the kings of Delhi had been Afghans but a few years before. When a member of the deposed dynasty appeared among them in Bihar, there were all the materials for a formidable