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OF THE EMPEROR AKBAR.
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skill, offering in exchange for it his whole kingdom. The Sheikh refused to instruct him. On this Akbar ordered him to be bound hand and foot, and threatened to have him tossed into the river, where, if he possessed the faculty to which he pretended, he would suffer no injury; and if he was an impostor, he would be punished deservedly for his fraud. This menace alarmed the Sheikh: he confessed the whole to be a trick, practised in confederacy with his son, who was covertly stationed on the opposite side of the stream, and counterfeited his father's voice.
Whatever we may think of the proposed result, we can scarcely question the judiciousness of the means; and the enactments above enumerated were well calculated to abrogate the Mohammedan creed, and erect on its ruin a modification of Hinduism less gross than the prevailing polytheism. There is one part of the plan, however, which is less entitled to approbation; and we can scarcely reconcile Akbar's assumption of a more than human character with the good sense displayed in the general prosecution of his reform). At the same time, it is not improbable that the personage was only politically enacted, in order to give greater weight to his innovations. In fact this seems to be intimated by our author, who alludes to a discussion between Akbar and Bhagaván Dás, in which he says, they concurred in the opinion, that many would be ready to acknowledge the existence of defects and errors in both the Mohammedan and Hindu creed, but that few or none would submit the correction of
