and wealth with which we now found ourselves surrounded. This will also give him a better idea than any thing else could do as to what those imperial people risked in their desperate enterprise, when pensions, palaces, titles, ancestral monuments, and mausoleums, with all their gorgeous traditions, were the mighty stakes ventured in the frantic and final struggle of their dynasty with a superior civilization and the strength which accompanies it. We were, though we knew it not, contemplating many of these glories for the last time in which men could gaze in admiration upon them, for most of them, save the Taj and the Kootub, were destined to destruction by the ruin which war was so soon to bring. When we saw them again, one year afterward, “the glory had departed,” save in the cases given. The Taj, especially, seemed as though self-protected by its own purity and loveliness; even ravaging war respected it, friend and foe alike agreeing that its beauty should remain unsullied forever.
The first permanent conquest by a Mohammedan sovereign in India was that made by Mahmoud of Ghuznee in the year 1001. Sixty-five rulers of that faith, during the following eight centuries, tried to maintain their authority over the great Hindoo nations. It may be doubted whether any part of the world was ever so cursed by a line of bigoted, ferocious wretches as, with two or three exceptions, were these Mohammedan despots of India during that time. To many of them may be truly applied the terrible lines of Moore:
“One of that saintly, murderous brood,
To carnage and the Koran given,
Who think through unbelievers' blood
Lies their directest path to heaven;
One who will pause and kneel unshod
In the warm blood his hand hath poured,
To mutter o'er some text of God
Engraven on his reeking sword;
Nay, who can coolly note the line,
The letters of those words divine,
To which his blade, with searching art,
Had sunk into its victim's heart!”
And all this transacted by these “bloody men” under the professed sanction and authority of a holy and merciful God, whose
