non; I longed
for interviews with the Llamas of Tibet or with the padris of
Portugal, and I would gladly sit with the priests of the Parsis and
the learned of the Zend-avesta. I was sick of the learned of my own
land.'

From this period he was attached to the court, and there arose
between himself and Akbar one of those pure friendships founded on
mutual esteem and mutual sympathy, which form the delight of
existence. In the Emperor Abulfazl found the aptest of pupils. Amid
the joys of the chase, the cares of governing, the fatigues of war,
Akbar had no recreation to be compared to the pleasure of listening
to the discussions between his much regarded friend and the bigoted
Muhammadan doctors of law and religion who strove to confute him.
These discourses constituted a great event in his reign. It is
impossible to understand the character of Akbar without referring to
them somewhat minutely. Akbar did not suddenly imbibe those
principles of toleration and of equal government for all, the
enforcement of which marks an important era in the history of India.
For the first twenty years of his reign he had to conquer to maintain
his power. With the representatives of dispossessed dynasties in
Bengal, in Behar, in Orissa, in {154} Western India, including
Gujarat and Khandesh, ready to seize an opportunity, to sit still was
to invite attack. He was forced to go forward. The experience of the
past, and the events daily coming under his notice, alike proved that
there must be but one paramount authority in India, if India was to
enjoy the blessings of internal peace.

During those twenty years he had had many intervals of leisure which
he had employed in discussing with those about him the problem of
founding a system of government which should retain by the sympathy
of the people all that was being conquered. He had convinced his own
mind that the old methods were obsolete; that to hold India by
maintaining standing armies in the several provinces, and to take no
account of the feelings, the traditions, the longings, the
aspirations, of the children of the soil,--of all the races in the
world the most inclined to poetry and sentiment, and attached by the
strongest ties that can appeal to mankind to the traditions of their
fathers--would be impossible.

That system, tried for more than four centuries, had invariably
broken down, if not in the hands of the promulgator of it, certainly
in those of a near successor. Yet none