PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION.
The success of the several series of “Romantic Tales of History” already published has induced the publishers of these works to extend them in order to embrace a portion of history generally considered extremely exuberant in romantic features. The present series will be confined to the Mahomedan conquests in India, in the records of which are to be found numerous events of signal and stirring interest, which, while they develope the character of a distant people in a remote age, serve also to confirm many fine axioms of moral truth by exhibiting how, under all the variations of clime and fluctuations of circumstance, the great result of human actions is everywhere the same.
This being a portion of history with which the general reader is less familiar than with that embraced in the preceding series of this work, the choice has been made under the impression that it may lead to a more extended reading of those annals which contain some of the most interesting facts to be found in the records of ages.
But while I feel that the subject is an important one, I have not been insensible to the difficulties with which it is encompassed, and in proportion to the success of those volumes already before the public has my consciousness of these difficulties been raised, for, feeling that I have had greater impediments to success to overcome, I cannot but be less sanguine in the expectation that I have realized what has been so well done by my predecessors in a similar field.
Romantic as are many of the events which the Mahomedan annals supply, they are nevertheless all of one tone and colouring. They want the delightful blendings and tintings of social circumstances. Their princes were despots, their nobles warriors, their governments tyrannies, and their people slaves. The lives of their most eminent men, who were distinguished chiefly for their deeds in arms, present little else than a series of battles. Their principal amusement was the chase, in which similar perils to those presented in war were courted for the stern glory which followed desperate achievements.
If, therefore, in the following tales the variety should appear less than in those found in the volumes of the same work which have preceded these, the cause, and consequently the excuse, must lie in the materials. Besides this, those beautiful features of domestic life so frequently witnessed in our western world have little or no existence in the land to which the present volumes are devoted. Women confined in harems, and not admitted to the tender and endearing enjoyments of family intercourse, degraded below the dignity of their nature and of their reason, treated as secondary beings, as mere instruments of pleasure, and as created for no better purpose than to perpetuate the human race, are no longer objects either for the rich colouring of romance or the graver delineations of moral narrative.
Great variety of character is not to be found among those isolated beings who are so well calculated to cast a glory upon the human pilgrimage,—not that variety of character does not exist, but it is not developed. All the pictures of life, therefore, among such a community will necessarily possess a certain sameness inseparable from their very nature. I have, however, endeavoured to vary the materials as much as was consistent with the régime of the history, though I sometimes found them very intractable. I can scarcely hope that I have succeeded in a labour of no common difficulty, but trust, nevertheless, that this last series of “Romantic Tales of History” may not be found undeserving of public patronage.