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OF THE EMPEROR AKBAR.
397
the study of poetry, which was only calculated to foster refractory humours, and occasion public com
motions.
In the thirty-sixth and thirty-ninth years of the emperor's reign some additions to these provisions were made. The flesh of cows, buffaloes, horses, camels, and sheep, was prohibited. The Mohammedan rite of circumcision was not to be practised on boys under the age of twelve, and after that only with their own consent. In all marriages, the age of the parties was verifiable before the Kotwal. All persons were declared free to choose their own religion: but if a Hindu female were induced, by affection for a man of the Musalman persuasion, to join that faith, she might be compelled to abandon it, and be compulsorily reattached to her original creed. Every one was permitted to erect temples, mosques, churches, or tombs, according to their own inclination.
This terminates the code of religious legislation which our author has commemorated, and these different enactments enable us to form a tolerably correct notion of the system which Akbar was anxious to introduce.
The first thing that is very apparent, is a decided hostility to the Mohammedan religion. It would not probably have been safe to have attempted its direct suppression; and it would have been also inconsistent with the miversal toleration, intimated in the above rules, and, as is expressly stated, frequently enjoined by Akbar himself. The Mohammedan creed was there
