Page:History of India Vol 4.djvu/68

46 a brief triumph. Both held high rank, but Faizi prized his office of poet-laureate above any political power, while Abu-l-Fazl became Divan, or Treasurer, of the Province of Delhi. These two brilliant and sympathetic brothers were now Akbar's chief intimates, and he found in their devotion more than compensation for the solitary elevation that is the inevitable fate of a reforming sovereign born centuries before the accepted time. Probably they encouraged him in the fancies and extravagances which somewhat marred his later life. One of these fancies was a belief that the religion of Islam would not survive its millennium, and that its collapse would be accompanied by the advent of the Mahdi, the Lord of the Age, in whom Akbar was easily induced to recognize himself. He ordered a "History of the Millennium" (Tarikh-i-Alfi) to be compiled by a company of scholars, including the reluctant Badauni, to put a seal, as it were, upon an extinct religion. The events of the thousand years of doomed Islam were related from a Shi'a point of view, and, to add to the confusion, the chronology was reckoned from the death of the Prophet instead of from his flight (Hijra).

This was an example of Akbar's love of innovation, and it is impossible to deny that he was fond of experiment and novelty for their own sake. "All good things must once have been new," he remarked, and accordingly he tested the novel habit of smoking tobacco, which was first introduced in India in his reign. As Dr. Holden has said, "He experimented in all departments, from religion to metallurgy," and some