t once from a multitude of impositions and vexations which
were painfully felt every day at every fireside, was in no humour to
dispute the validity of the charters under which a few companies to
London traded with distant parts of the world.

Of these companies by far the most important was that which had been, on
the last day of the sixteenth century, incorporated by Queen Elizabeth
under the name of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London
trading to the East Indies. When this celebrated body began to exist,
the Mogul monarchy was at the zenith of power and glory. Akbar, the
ablest and best of the princes of the House of Tamerlane, had just
been borne, full of years and honours, to a mausoleum surpassing in
magnificence any that Europe could show. He had bequeathed to his
posterity an empire containing more than twenty times the population and
yielding more than twenty times the revenue of the England which, under
our great Queen, held a foremost place among European powers. It is
curious and interesting to consider how little the two countries,
destined to be one day so closely connected, were then known to each
other. The most enlightened Englishmen looked on India with ignorant
admiration. The most enlightened natives of India were scarcely aware
that England existed. Our ancestors had a dim notion of endless bazaars,
swarming with buyers and sellers, and blazing with cloth of gold, with
variegated silks and with precious stones; of treasuries where diamonds
were piled in heaps and sequins in mountains; of palaces, compared with
which Whitehall and Hampton Court were hovels; of armies ten times as
numerous as that which they had seen assembled at Tilbury to repel
the Armada. On the other hand, it was probably not known to one of the
statesmen in the Durbar of Agra that there was near the setting sun a
great city of infidels, called London, where a woman reigned, and
that she had given to an association of Frank merchants the exclusive
privilege of freighting ships from her dominions to the Indian seas.
That this association would one day rule all India, from the ocean to
the everlasting snow, would reduce to profound obedience great provinces
which had never submitted to Akbar's authority, would send Lieutenant
Governors to preside in his capital, and would dole out a monthly
pension to his heir, would have seemed to the wisest of European or
of Oriental politicians as impossible as that inhabitants of our g