his nobles. These occupied tents inferior only in
degree to that of the sovereign. Then ensued, in the sight of the
people, the ceremony of weighing the sovereign against various
articles, to be distributed to those who needed them. According to
the number of years the sovereign had lived there was given away an
equal number of sheep, goats, and fowls to the breeders of those
animals. A number of the smaller animals were likewise set at
liberty. The Emperor himself distributed with his own hand almonds
and fruits of the lighter sort among his courtiers.

On the great day of the festival Akbar seated himself on his throne,
sparkling with diamonds, and surrounded by his chiefest nobles, all
magnificently attired. Then there passed before him, in review, the
elephants with their head and breast-plates adorned with rubies and
other stones, the horses splendidly caparisoned, the rhinoceroses,
the lions, the tigers, the panthers, the hunting-leopards, the
hounds, the hawks, the procession concluding with the splendidly
attired cavalry. This is no fancy picture. The like of it was
witnessed by Hawkins, by Roe, and by Terry, in the time of the son
and successor of Akbar, and those eminent travellers have painted in
gorgeous colours the magnificence of the spectacle.

{196} These scenes were witnessed only on days of high ceremony. At
ordinary times Akbar was the simple, unaffected, earnest man, ever
striving after truth, such as the work he accomplished gives evidence
of. That work was the consolidation of an empire, torn by Muhammadan
conquerors for more than four centuries, and at the end of that
period still unsettled, still unconsolidated. During those four
centuries the principles of the Kuran, read in a bigoted and
unnatural sense by the Afghan conquerors, had been distorted to rob
and plunder the Hindu population. The most enlightened of his earlier
predecessors, Sultan Firuz Shah, described by an English writer as
possessing 'a humane and generous spirit,' confesses how he
persecuted those who had not accepted the faith of Islam. Those
principles of persecution for conscience sake, in full swing at the
time of the accession of Akbar, Akbar himself abolished.

Akbar's great idea was the union of all India under one head. A union
of beliefs he recognised at a very early stage as impossible. The
union therefore must be a union of interests. To accomplish such a
union it was necessary, first, to conquer; secondly, to re