and courtly manners could alone obtain.  These offices had long been exclusively filled by such men, who flocked in crowds to India from Khorasan and Persia.  Every man qualified by secular instruction to make his way at court and fill such offices was disposed by his religions instruction to assert the supremacy of his creed, and to exclude the followers of every other from the employments over which he had any control.  The aristocracy of office was the ocean to which this stream of Muhammadan education flowed from the west, and spread all over India; and had Dara subdued his brothers and ascended the throne, he would probably have arrested the flood by closing the public offices against these Persian adventurers, and filling them with Christians and Hindoos.  This would have changed the character of the aristocracy and the education of the people.[16]

While looking upon the slab under which his head reposes, I thought of the slight ‘accidents by flood and field’, the still slighter thought of the brain and feeling of the heart, on which the destinies of nations and of empires often depend—­on the discovery of the great diamond in the mines of Golconda—­on the accident which gave it into the hands of an ambitions Persian adventurer—­on the thought which suggested the advantage of presenting it to Shah Jahan—­on the feeling which made Dara get off, and Aurangzeb sit on his elephant at the battle of Samugarh, on which depended the fate of India, and perhaps the advancement of the Christian religion and European literature and science over India.[17] But for the accident which gave Charles Martel the victory over the Saracens at Tours,[18] Arabic and Persian had perhaps been the classical languages, and Islamism the religion of Europe; and where we have cathedrals and colleges we might have had mosques and mausoleums; and America and the Cape, the compass and the press, the steam-engine, the telescope, and the Copernican System, might have remained still undiscovered; and but for the accident which turned Hannibal’s face from Rome after the battle of Cannae, or that which intercepted his brother Asdrubal’s letter, we might now all be speaking the languages of Tyre and Sidon, and roasting our own children in offerings to Siva or Saturn, instead of saving those of the Hindoos.  Poor Dara! but for thy little jealousy of thy father and thy son, thy desire to do all thy work without their aid, and those occasional ebullitions of passion which alienated from thee the most powerful of all the Hindoo princes, whom it was so much thy wish and thy interest to cherish, thy generous heart and enlightened mind had reigned over this vast empire, and made it, perchance, the garden it deserves to be made.