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62 common talk. In a few years Englishmen came to see him face to face, as no Indian king had been seen by Europeans since the days when Alexander met Porus on the plains of the Jihlam.

Hitherto, India, except in parts of the coasts of the peninsula, had been practically a terra incognita. What little was known had filtered through Portuguese missionaries, and one has only to turn over a few pages of the travels of Europeans in the first quarter of the seventeenth century to realize how little these writers were prepared for the sights they saw. They found a novel and almost undreamt of civilization, possessing elements of practical statesmanship and sagacity which the most philosophic of them all, the French physician Bernier, deemed worthy of commendation to the serious consideration of the minister of Louis XIV. They met with a series of spectacles, ceremonies, customs, religions, and systems of government which were wholly unforeseen; and where they expected to find at the utmost rude and vacuous pomp, they encountered literature and learning, poetry and art, and a reasoned theory of government, which, in spite of their Western prejudices, fairly compelled their admiration. With all this they discovered only too many examples of superstition and degradation, and witnessed scenes of savage cruelty contrasted with barbaric splendour; yet the splendour and the degradation were such as belong not to uncivilized races, but to the exuberance of a great empire.

The native annalists of the Moghul period are both