[Illustration: _Frontispiece._ Page 363. JEHANGIRE GOING TO VISIT MHER-UL-NISSA.] _THE “PRIZE LIBRARY.”_ LEGENDARY & ROMANTIC TALES OF INDIAN HISTORY. BY THE REV. HOBART CAUNTER, B.D. [Illustration] LONDON: FREDERICK WARNE AND CO. AND NEW YORK. PREFACE. This Volume of Legendary and Romantic Tales of Indian History was one of a series of historical tales founded on the histories of England, France, Spain, Italy, and India, which obtained great popularity when first published. The copyright of them having passed to the present Publishers, they have been induced to reproduce them in a compact form--complete in a single volume--in the belief that by so doing they will be adding to the literary pleasure of another generation. 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.