government. Sikandra, the burial-place of Akbar, is named after him,
and there he built a garden-house which subsequently became the tomb
of Mariam Zâmâni, one of Akbar's wives. The son of Sultan Sikandar,
Ibrahim Lodi, was defeated and slain by Babar at Panipat, near Delhi,
in 1526, and from that time Agra became one of the principal cities
of the Mogul Empire which Babar founded.


The Great Moguls.--I. Babar.

Though very few memorials of Babar's short but brilliant reign still
exist at Agra, the life of this remarkable man is so important a
part of the Mogul dynasty that it must not be passed over by the
intelligent tourist or student of Mogul art. It was Babar's sunny
disposition, and the love of nature characteristic of his race, that
brought back into Indian art the note of joyousness which it had not
known since the days of Buddhism. Babar is one of the most striking
figures in Eastern history. He was descended from Tamerlane, or Timur,
on his father's side, and, on his mother's, from Chinghiz Khan. In
the year 1494, at the age of twelve, he became king of Farghana, a
small kingdom of Central Asia, now known as Kokand. His sovereignty,
however, was of a very precarious tenure, for he was surrounded on
all sides by a horde of rapacious, intriguing relatives, scrambling
for the fragments of Timur's empire. With hardly a trustworthy
ally except a remarkably clever and courageous old grandmother, he
struggled for three years to retain his birthright. Then, acting on a
sudden inspiration, he made a dash for Samarkand, the ancient capital
of Timur, and won it. In his delightful memoirs Babar describes how,
with boyish glee, he paced the ramparts himself, wandered from palace
to palace, and revelled in the fruit-gardens of what was then one of