Machine summary:
I HE character of the last of the great Moguls, Aurangzebe, has general• ly suffered at the hands of historians, particularly Europeans, posterity having only confirmed the condemnation of many of the Emperor's foreign contemporaries.
And as I continued my work of painting the magnificent monument of the Saint, this shadow pro• longed itself, extending a prong, like a finger pointing towards the Tomb.
Now when one is sketching a rarely fascinating subject like this one,• white domes, flaming golden finials, a green-and-yellow pillared porch, and a sky of Indian blue-the picture may well seem almost to make itself, so to speak.
In my own case, while I was painting the Saint's tomb my mind was on the Emperor's grave, its august occupant, and that pointing finger of shadow upon the pavement,--that aspiring indication, which daily approached, but could never attain to the plinth on which stood the sacred edifice.
And yet the meanest imagination cannot but expand, and the most phlegmatic pulse quicken, when we read in the pages of History or Drama of the rise, greatness, power and (comparative) decline, of " the most magnificent of the Mogul Emperors of India.
The splendour of the Mogul Empire under Aurangzebe has been one of the world's great themes of History and Drama.
And the Wonderland of India culminated and centred in the dazzling personality of Aurangzebe, the simplicity and austerity of whose life was such that '' his Moslem subjects regarded him as a Saint.