court over which the greatest of the Moghul Emperors—­the contemporary of our own great Queen Elizabeth—­presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his long reign.  Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu than of Mahomedan inspiration.  For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over against it, in the beautiful “Golden House,” dwelt his Rajput consort, Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir.  Nor did he forget his favourite friends and counsellors.  Upon no building in Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and illustrious Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to Akbar.  The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation, untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar’s should live.  In the great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all denominations in search of religious truth.  The spirit which inspired Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the “Gate of Victory,” the lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the spacious mosque quadrangle:  “Jesus, on whom be peace, said:  ’The world is a bridge.  Pass over it, but build not upon it.  The world endures but an hour; spend that hour in devotion.’”

It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them, he foresaw that his life’s work would assuredly some day be wrecked.  Did he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had already taken the civil law, into his own hands?  Or was even as noble a mind as his not proof against the overweening hubris to which a despotic genius has so often succumbed?  One momentous evening, in the Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor’s infallibility in the domain of faith.  From claiming the right to explain away the Koran, which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating it altogether, there was but a short step.  Akbar very soon took it.  He promulgated a new religion, which he called the