supreme satisfaction of having expressed the best that was in him with no eye cast upon a clamouring public. With the very best reason in the world might he have said with Mozart that he wrote for himself and a few friends.

But man cannot live upon self-expression. And Meredith, while he permitted himself the luxury of writing as he thought right, was keenly alive to the duty of earning bread and butter. He was no shirker, hiding himself behind his temperament and his necessities. He found no toil too burdensome to be carried. "I never refuse work," said he. If the world would not read nor understand his books, he was not afraid of drudgery. He wrote for journals, and he read for publishers. Whatever he undertook he performed with a fiery zeal. Some of the letters here quoted, which he addressed to authors who had submitted their works for his opinion, prove how keenly he felt the responsibility of his office, with how kindly a wisdom he reproved or counselled. Aud always apart from the inevitable drudgery he kept a space and a time for the work which really mattered to him, and which still really matters

to us.

Thus we perceive the true value of Meredith's letters. They are letters of a sane mind and a a good courage. Yet the burden which he had gaily borne himself he had no wish to lay upon others. Did you ever hear of a man of

letters urging his craft upon another? Each one of us thinks the craft imperative. Each one of us is prepared to make the sacrifice which it demands. But none who has felt the strain desires to enrol others in the army. And when George Meredith found in his son Arthur a love of the inkpot, he sternly interposed. "My novels," he told him, "have been kept back by my having had to write on newspapers- the only things that paid. So take this as a moral: don't think of literature as a profession." The advice fell upon deaf ears, as it fell upon Meredith's own ears, and Arthur's desire to write still grew upon him. Again his father intervened. "When I was informed," said he, "of your wishing to throw up your situation at Lille that you might embrace the profession of literature, I was alarmed. My own mischance in that walk I thought a warning." If ever a man was conscious of his power, it was Meredith; if ever a man succeeded at last in achieving his artistic purpose, it was the author of 'Harry Richmond'; yet he speaks gravely of his mischance, and holds himself up to an aspiring son as one whose example should be avoided.

The experience of George Meredith is the general experience of the great. He was no Post - Impressionist aiming at eccentricity. No writer ever worked in sterner obedience to the great tradition than he.

THERE are few countries whose history is more romantic than India; yet it has taken the English people an extraordinarily long time to find this out. It might have been supposed that our imagination would easily have been kindled by the story of the splendid princes who gloried and drank deep in the gardens and marble palaces by the banks of the Jamna; but such are the limitations of the human mind that we are usually unable to perceive beauty or romance in what is remote from our own experience. The unknown can only become romantic to us when it is linked up with conceptions which have already stirred our imagination. When a consummate journalist long ago wished to awaken interest in India he recognised this, and prudently abstained from referring directly to Fatehpur Sikri or Shahjehan, but described the glories of the Moghul Empire in terms of Europe. "The people of India," said Macaulay, "had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the Cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys whose splendour far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would

have astonished the Great Captain." One is tempted to think that Macaulay might have found a yet more suggestive parallel in the 'Arabian Nights.' He might with more truth than usual have said that every schoolboy knows the story of Harun al Rashid and Zobeide, and even Baghdad was probably not more resplendent than Delhi in its prime. Something, too, of the spirit of an Eastern fairy tale hung about the descendants of Tamerlane. They would occasionally do the wild extravagant things which we all in imagination demand of the real despot, but which outside the pages of the Arabian Nights' he never does. Like "good Haroun Alraschid in his golden prime," Humayun once rewarded a water-carrier who had saved his life by seating him for a day upon his throne in Agra, and from sunrise to sunset the peasant was actually a king. In the palace of Fatehpur Sikri may still be seen a great tesselated pavement on which Akbar is said to have played chess in the cool of the evening, his pawns being sixteen beautiful slave girls, richly dressed and covered with jewels, who became the prize of the victor. And if ever the diamonds, rubies, and emeralds which sparkle through the 'Arabian Nights' were seen of waking eyes, it was at the

jewelled court of the Great Moghul. Even our sober compatriot, Sir Thomas Roe, slips into oriental metaphor when describing them. He once got a peep at the two principal wives of Jehangir behind a screen, and, in spite of the obscurity in which they sat, he was able to make out that they were "indifferently" fair, and he adds: "If there had been no other light, their diamonds and pearls had sufficed to show them." The monarch himself fairly blazed with jewels. "On his head he wore a rich turbant with a plume of heron's feathers, not many but long. On one side hung a ruby unset, as big as a walnut; on the other side a diamond as large; in the middle an emerald like a heart, much bigger. His staff was wound about with a chain of great pearl, rubies and diamonds drill'd. About his neck he wore a chain of three strings of most excellent pearl, the largest I ever saw." And so accoutred, with English English gloves stuck under his girdle, the Great Moghul went for the first time to take his seat in a coach.

But there is really no need of analogies drawn from Spain or the Arabian Nights' to make Indian history interesting. It is of itself full of the charm of romance, and if Englishmen have hitherto failed to find this out, the blame lies with our English historians of India. It must be confessed that most of the writers on Indian history accessible to the general reader

are frigid and tedious. They have too often been wanting in a generous enthusiasm for their subject, and have been at greater pains to point out faults than to appreciate greatness. But this is no way to write history: it is not enough to say that Jehangir was a drunkard, that Shahjehan was a voluptuary, and to label Aurangzib a bigot or a hypocrite. It is true that the descendants of Babar were very human, and had an abundant measure of human frailty, but these crude epithets do not help us to understand how they created a magnificent empire out of next to nothing, how they founded a new school of art and raised buildings which are the wonder of the world, and how they drew together a glittering court which dazzled Frenchmen who had seen Louis le Grand at Versailles. And the Moghuls did even more than this-they achieved something in the higher walks of statesmanship which nobody, before or since, has quite succeeded in rivalling. They cast a spell over men's hearts, which is comparable only to the spell which Imperial Rome cast upon the peoples of Western Europe, and in the short space of 150 to 200 years they created among the diverse races and creeds of Northern India something approaching to a sentiment of nationality. The men who did this may have been loose livers, but they must have been a great deal more besides, and we can dispense with the sermon upon their private lives until we

have been made to understand their essential greatness. Mr H. G. Keene and Mr Stanley Lane-Poole have done much to place the history of Muhamadan India in the right perspective, but a book was still wanted which would make a wider public appreciate the charm of this romantic epoch. Such a book has, I think, at last appeared under the title 'When Kings rode to Delhi,' by Miss Gabrielle Festing.1 The particular merit of Miss Festing is that she feels the pathos and romance which hang about the crumbling walls of Delhi, and makes us feel it too. Her little book does not profess to be a contribution to the scholarship of the world, but it is a contribution, and, I think, a valuable one, to our historic sympathies. No reader can lay it down without a warmer feeling for the brave men, and for the noble women too, who fought, and loved, and died upon the storied plain which stretches from the great Minar of Qutbuddin Aibek to the statue of Nicholson.

The history of Muhamadan dominion in India may be said to begin from the year 1206 A.D., when Qutbuddin assumed the insignia of sovereignty, and from this date to 1526, when the first of the Moghuls invaded India, thirty-four kings sat on the throne of Delhi; but so completely have they been eclipsed by the glory of their successors that popular imag

ination has retained but few of their names, and even Muhamadans hold their memory in comparatively small account. They lived in a wild age, and most of their time was spent in fighting: sometimes the kingdom of Delhi shrank to very small dimensions, but when, as not infrequently happened, a strong man rose to the throne, he disciplined the Afghan and Turkoman marauders into an obedient host and ruled over a wide kingdom. Such a one was Balban, who had originally come to Delhi as a slave in singularly unpropitious cireumstances. The King of Delhi had commissioned a merchant to buy slaves for him in Central Asia. Ninety-and-nine did the king approve when he returned, but when he saw the hundredth, a mean-looking little fellow, he exclaimed, "I will not take this one."

"Master of the World!" cried Balban piteously, "for whom hast thou bought all these?"

"For myself," laughed the king.

"Then buy me for the love of God!" pleaded Balban.

The king bought him, and Balban rose step by step, as other slaves had done before him, until he became Wazir and the real ruler of the kingdom, while his nominal master devoted his time to making copies of the Koran "with great taste and elegance." For twenty years he governed for this gentle recluse, putting