d his charity and toleration from the Hindoo mother
of Jahangir. The influences which really moulded the opinions of both
Abul Fazl and his royal master are well known. When Akbar and Abul
Fazl are compared with Elizabeth and Burleigh, Philip II and Alva, or
the other sovereigns and ministers of the age in Europe, it seems to
be little less than a miracle that the Indian statesmen should have
held and practised the noble philosophy expounded in the above
quotation from the 'Institutes of Akbar'. No man has deserved better
than Akbar the stately eulogy pronounced by Wordsworth on a hero now
obscure:

A meteor wert thou in a darksome night;
Yet shall thy name, conspicuous and sublime,
Stand in the spacious firmament of time,
Fixed as a star: such glory is thy right.
(_Sonnets dedicated to Liberty_, Part Second, No. XVII.)

20. The story is absurd, the saint having died early in 1572, when
the Fathpur-Sikri buildings were in progress.

'The city . . . is enclosed on three sides by high embattlemented
stone walls pierced by. . . gateways protected by heavy and grim
semi-circular bastions of rubble masonry. The fourth side was
protected by a large lake.' There were nine gateways (E. W. Smith,
op. cit., pp. 1, 59; pl. xci, xciii). The Sangin Burj, or Stone
Tower, is a fine unfinished fortification (ibid., p. 34). The dam of
the lake burst in the 27th year of the reign, A.D. 1582 (Latif,
_Agra_, p. 159). The circumference of the town is variously stated as
either six or seven miles.

21. Akbar began the works at the fort of Agra in A.H. 972,
corresponding to A.D. 1564-65, several years before he began those at
Fathpur in A.D. 1569-70 (E. & D., vol. v, pp. 295, 332); and the
buildings at Agra and Fathpur were carried on concurrently. He
continued building at Fathpur nearly to the close of his reign. Agra
was never 'an unpeopled waste' during Akbar's reign. Sikandar Lodi
had made it his capital in A.D. 1501.

22. That is to say, the grantees have now to pay land revenue, or
rent, to the state.

23. No good general description of the buildings at Agra, Sikandra,
and Fathpur-Sikri exists. The following list indicates the beat
treatises available.

(1) Syad Muhammad Latif--_Agra, Historical and Descriptive., &c._;
8vo, Calcutta, 1896, Useful, but crude and badly illustrated.

(2) E. W. Smith--_The Moghul Architecture of Fathpur-Sikri_; 4 Parts,
4to, Government Press, Allahabad, 1894-8.