PREFACE.

Though the reason that has compelled a change of author­ship in the continued translation of the Áin i Akbari is doubtless universally known, the regretful duty of its for­mal announcement is imperative in the introduction of this volume. The early and somewhat sudden death of Professor Blochmann is a loss which Oriental literature may be per­mitted to share with his personal friends, and its regrets, though differing in kind and measure from theirs, will not be less grateful to his memory from its independence of associa­tions in which friendship bears a part, and as a testimony to his appreciation in a wider sphere where partial judgments have no sway. This is not the place to pass in review his services to letters which have been adequately commemorated elsewhere by the Asiatic Society of Bengal for whom he so largely laboured, but as commissioned by their authority to continue the work which death has snatched from an able hand, it is fitting that these few words from his successor should record the unfortunate necessity of their action. It was at one time supposed that the manuscript of the whole translation had been completed by Professor Blochmann and prepared for the press, but whatever the origin of the rumour, no trace of the work was discovered amongst his papers, and the interval of five years between the conclusion of the first volume and his death, leaves little doubt that the report had no foundation. His preface deplores or excuses the delay that had already occurred in the translation of the volume then issued, and could not have omitted mention of the early completion of the whole were the manuscript of the remainder ready for publication. The enumeration of the difficulties which stood in his way is expressed in terms which imply that they had not been overcome, else his silence, when silence might be interpreted to his prejudice, is inexplicable. It may be, therefore, safely assumed that want of leisure, or other weighty reason, had hindered his continuance of a work which had become the preoccupation of his most serious study and which he hoped to leave to posterity as a record that he had not toiled in vain. But the event was otherwise ordained.

While sensible of the honour conferred upon me by the Asiatic Society in selecting me for the duty of entering upon the labours and sharing the reward of my predecessor, I cannot but express my diffidence in presenting this second volume to public notice under their auspices, lest a com­parison should discredit the wisdom of the choice. But whatever the verdict of those competent from linguistic knowledge and acquaintance with the abrupt, close and enigmatic style of the original to judge of the merits of the translation, no pains at least have been spared to render it a faithful counterpart consistently with a clear­ness of statement which the text does not everywhere show. The peculiar tone and spirit of Abul Fazl are difficult to catch and to sustain in a foreign tongue. His style, in my opinion, is not deserving of imitation even in his own. His merits as a writer have, in general, been greatly exaggerated. Omitting the contemporary and interest­ing memoirs of Al Badáoni, whose scathing comments on the deeds and motives of king and minister have an independent value of their own, the accident that Abul Fazl's works form the most complete and authoritative history of the events of Akbar's reign, has given them a great and peculiar importance as state records. This they eminently deserve, but as exemplars of style, in comparison with the immutable types of excellence fixed for ever by Greece and Rome, they have no place. His unique position in Akbar's court and service enhanced the reputation of all that he wrote, and his great industry in a position which secured wealth and invited indolence, fully merited the admiration of his countrymen. Regarded as a statistician, no details from the revenues of a province to the cost of a pine-apple, from the organisation of an army and the grades and duties of the nobility to the shape of a candlestick and the price of a curry-comb, are beyond his miscrospic and patient investigation: as an annalist, the movements and conduct of his sovereign are surrounded with the impeccability that fences and deifies Oriental despotism, and chronicled with none of the skill and power, and more than the flattery of Velleius Paterculus: as a finished diplomatist, his letters to recalcitrant generals and rebellious viceroys are Eastern models of astute persuasion, veiling threats with compliments, and insinuating rewards and promises with­out committing his master to their fulfilment. But these epistles which form one of his monuments to fame, consist of interminable sentences involved in frequent parentheses difficult to unravel, and paralleled in the West only by the decadence of taste, soaring in prose, as Gibbon justly remarks, to the vicious affectation of poetry, and in poetry sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose, which characterizes Byzantine eloquence in the tenth century. A similar affectation, and probably its prototype, is to be found in the most approved Arab masters of florid com­position of the same epoch, held by Ibn Khallikan's crude and undisciplined criticism to be the perfection of art, and which still remains in Hindustan the ideal of every aspiring scribe. His annals have none of the pregnant meaning and point that in a few masterly strokes, exalt or brand a name to all time, and flash the actors of his drama across the living page in scenes that dwell for ever in the memory. The history of nearly forty-six years of his master's reign contains not a line that lives in household words among his own countrymen, not a beautiful image that the mind delights to recall, not a description that rises to great power or pathos, nor the unconscious simplicity redeeming its wearisome length which lends such a charm to Herodotus, and which in the very exordium of Thucydides, in Lucian's happy phrase, breathes the fragrance of Attic thyme. His narrative affects a quaint and stiff phraseology which renders it often obscure, and continues in an even monotone, never rising or falling save in reference to the Emperor whose lightest mention compels the adoring prostration of his pen, and round whom the world of his characters and events revolves as its central sun. What­ever its merit as a faithful representation, in a restricted sense, of a reign in which he was a capable and distin­guished actor, it lacks the interesting details and portraiture of the life and manners of the nation which are commonly thought to be below the dignity of history but which brighten the pages of Eastern historians less celebrated than himself, and are necessary to the light and shade of a perfect picture. His statistical and geographical survey of the empire which this volume comprises is a laborious though somewhat lifeless compilation, of the first importance indeed as a record of a past and almost forgotten administration to guide and instruct the historian of the future or the statesman of to-day, but uninformed by deductive comment and illustration which might relieve the long array of bald detail. His historical summaries of dynasties and events in the various Súbahs under their ancient autonomous rule, are incoherent abridg­ments, often so obscurely phrased as not to be under­stood without a previous knowledge of the events to which they relate and his meaning is rather to be conjectured than elicited from the grammatical analysis of his sentences. The sources from which he drew his information are neven acknowledged. This of itself would have been of no moment and their indication might perhaps have disturbed the unity of his design had he otherwise so incorporated the labours of others with his own as to stamp the whole with the impress of originality, but he not seldom extracts passages word for word from other authors undeterred by the fear, or heedless of the charge, of plagiarism.

Such, in my opinion, is the reverse of the medal which represents Abul Fazl unrivalled as a writer and beyond the reach of imitation. The fashion of exaggerating the impor­tance and merits of a subject or an author by those who make them their special study, especially when that study lies outside the common track of letters, inevitably brings its own retribution and ends by casting general discredit on what in its place and of its kind has its due share of honour or utility. The merit and the only merit of the Aín i Akbari is in what it tells and not in the manner of its tell­ing which has little to recommend it. It will deservedly go down to posterity as a unique compilation of the systems of administration and control throughout the vari­ous departments of Government in a great empire, faith­fully and minutely recorded in their smallest detail, with such an array of facts illustrative of its extent, resources, condition, population, industry and wealth as the abundant material supplied from official sources could furnish. This in itself is praise and fortune of no common order and it needs not the fictitious ascription of unparalleled powers of historiography in its support. The value of the Aín in this regard has been universally acknowledged by European scholars and it may not be out of place to quote here the opinion of the learned Reinaud on this work in his 1st vol. of the Geographie d 'Abulfeda, as it accurately represents its nature and worth and the style and quality of its literary composition.