Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/247

BABAR'S MEMOIRS 201 so rich in hope, courage, and resolve, and at the same time so warm and friendly, so very human, that it con- quers one's admiring sympathy. The utter frankness and self-revelation, the unconscious portraiture of all his virtues and follies, his obvious truthfulness and fine sense of honour give the Memoirs of this prince of auto- biographers an authority which is equal to their charm. The line of emperors descended from Babar is no more. The very name of Mongol has lost its influence on the banks of Jaxartes; the Turk is the servant of the Russian he once despised. The last Indian sovereign of Timor's race ended his inglorious career an exile at Rangoon almost within our own memory; a few years later the degenerate descendants of Chingiz Khan submitted to the officers of the Czar. The power and pomp of Babar 's dynasty are gone; the record of his life the Utter a script a that mocks at time remains unaltered and imperishable. Babar 's earlier career must be read elsewhere: it began far away from India, in the country beyond the Oxus, where the descendants of Timur struggled for the remaining fragment of the vast empire which had broken up as soon as his iron hand was set in death. Timur 's conquests were too recent and too hasty to be organized into settled empire. They were like a vast conflagration driven before the wind, which destroys the herbage for awhile, but when the flame has passed the earth grows green again. Even in his original home, the Oxus land, a single century saw the downfall of Timur 's dynasty: the fire had only left some embers,