numerous and authoritative. No one who has studied the invaluable series of volumes in which the late Sir Henry Elliot and Professor Dowson epitomized the "History of India as told by its own Historians," and extracts from which are given in the fifth volume of the present series, will be disposed to depreciate the importance of the Persian chronicles therein rendered with such erudition and skill. But the native writers have serious defects. They are prone to panegyric and are disposed to exaggerate the merits of reigning sovereigns and contemporary magnates with the traditional obsequiency of the Oriental author. They are apt to suppress facts which tell against their hero, and it is rare to come across an Indian writer with the critical or historical faculty. Besides, they naturally assume a familiarity with the every-day customs and methods of the age in India which a Western reader does not possess. They write as Indians for Indians. Had we to depend entirely upon them, our insight into life in the Moghul empire in the seventeenth century would be shallow. Fortunately we have other witnesses. Europeans of various nations, qualified in many respects to observe with penetration and record with accuracy, visited India in the period of Moghul supremacy, and their observations complete and correct with singular minuteness the narratives of native chroniclers.
The Fates were unusually propitious when they ordained that the Saturnian Age of Moghul power should coincide with the new epoch in European intercourse with the East. Up to the closing years of the
