ns, and invited to India from Persia by the public offices,
civil and military, which men of education and courtly manners could
alone obtain. These offices had long been exclusively filled by such
men, who flocked in crowds to India from Khorasan and Persia. Every
man qualified by secular instruction to make his way at court and
fill such offices was disposed by his religions instruction to assert
the supremacy of his creed, and to exclude the followers of every
other from the employments over which he had any control. The
aristocracy of office was the ocean to which this stream of
Muhammadan education flowed from the west, and spread all over India;
and had Dara subdued his brothers and ascended the throne, he would
probably have arrested the flood by closing the public offices
against these Persian adventurers, and filling them with Christians
and Hindoos. This would have changed the character of the aristocracy
and the education of the people.[16]

While looking upon the slab under which his head reposes, I thought
of the slight 'accidents by flood and field', the still slighter
thought of the brain and feeling of the heart, on which the destinies
of nations and of empires often depend--on the discovery of the great
diamond in the mines of Golconda--on the accident which gave it into
the hands of an ambitions Persian adventurer--on the thought which
suggested the advantage of presenting it to Shah Jahan--on the
feeling which made Dara get off, and Aurangzeb sit on his elephant at
the battle of Samugarh, on which depended the fate of India, and
perhaps the advancement of the Christian religion and European
literature and science over India.[17] But for the accident which
gave Charles Martel the victory over the Saracens at Tours,[18]
Arabic and Persian had perhaps been the classical languages, and
Islamism the religion of Europe; and where we have cathedrals and
colleges we might have had mosques and mausoleums; and America and
the Cape, the compass and the press, the steam-engine, the telescope,
and the Copernican System, might have remained still undiscovered;
and but for the accident which turned Hannibal's face from Rome after
the battle of Cannae, or that which intercepted his brother
Asdrubal's letter, we might now all be speaking the languages of Tyre
and Sidon, and roasting our own children in offerings to Siva or
Saturn, instead of saving those of the Hindoos. Poor Dara! but for
thy little jealousy of thy f