groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like the same bold span or the same lofty elevation.  Have we not there a symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture?  Even if the Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture.  The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except under compulsion.

To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan condottieri possessed.  A new power more equal to the task was already storming at the northern gates of India.  On a mound thirty-five miles north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous battles that decide the fate of nations.  It is Panipat.  There, on April 21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the last of the Lodis.  Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar horsemen; but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for empire.  He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his statesmanship as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries.  Though it was at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there to-day.  But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his son Humayun’s mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous feature in the plain of Delhi.  Endowed with many brilliant and amiable qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father or his son.  Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it, when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi caused his death at the early age of forty-eight.  But would he have been able to retain it?  He had by no means crushed the forces of rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule, and which were still holding the field under the leadership of the brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu.  Delhi itself was lost within a few months of Humayun’s death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty years after his grandfather’s brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan.  He too fought and won, and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to mould and to fashion at the promptings of his genius.