THE CHARACTER OF BABAR 199 tween Timur and Akbar. The blood of the two great scourges of Asia, Mongol and Turk, Chingiz and Timur, mingled in his veins, and to the daring and restlessness of the nomad Tartar he joined the culture and urbanity of the Persian. He brought the energy of the Mongol and the courage and capacity of the Turk to the sub- jection of the listless Hindu; and, himself a soldier of fortune and no architect of empire, he laid the first stone of the splendid fabric which his grandson Akbar completed. His connection with India began only in the last twelve years of his life. His youth was spent in inef- fectual struggles to preserve his sovereignty in his na- tive land. His early manhood, passed in his new king- dom of Kabul, was full of an unsatisfied yearning for the recovery of his mother country. It was not till the age of thirty-six that he abandoned his hope of a re- stored empire on the Oxus and Jaxartes, and turned his eyes resolutely towards the cities and spoils of Hindu- stan. Five times he invaded the northern plains, and the fifth invasion was a conquest. Five years he dwelt in the India he had now made his own, and in his forty- eighth year he died. His permanent place in history rests upon his Indian conquests, which opened the way for an imperial line; but his place in biography and in literature is deter- mined rather by his daring adventures and persevering efforts in his earlier days, and by the delightful Memoirs in which he related them. Soldier of fortune as he was, Babar was none the less a man of fine literary taste
