Twenty-Four years ago, when I was editing the Rambles and Recollections of Sir William Sleeman and was under the influence of that author’s enthusiastic comment that ‘Akbar has always appeared to me among sovereigns what Shakespeare was among poets I recorded the opinion that ‘ the competent scholar who will undertake the exhaustive treatment of the life and reign of Akbar will be in possession of perhaps the finest great historical subject as yet unappropriated. Since those words were printed in 1893 nobody has essayed to appropriate the subject. The hope that some day I might be able to take it up was always Present to my mind, but other more urgent tasks prevented me from seriously attempting to realize my old half-formed project until January 1915, when I resolved to undertake a life of Akbar on a scale rather smaller than that at first contemplated. The result of my researches during two years is now submitted to the judgement of the public.

Mughal-Library