16 
LIVES OF THE MOGHUL EMPERORS. 
conqueror, desiring to be led to victory under his ban- 
ners : they at once acknowledged him their chief, swore 
fealty to him as a leader worthy of their homage, and 
maintained towards him the same fidelity which would 
have been due from them had he been their hereditary 
sovereign. His influence daily strengthened. 
From this time he commenced a career of petty 
conquests, and of those tyrannies which were the 
natural results of them. He began to encroach upon 
the territories of the neighbouring tribes, and rapidly 
to enlarge his possessions. To these predatory begin- 
nings he owed his future dexterity in the art of offen- 
sive warfare. The ordinances of civil justice were to 
him secondary to those which ambition established 
within his heart as rules of right and as laws of con- 
duct ; yet it is amusing to see in his own memoirs 
how he affects a fastidious humanity as absurd as it is 
improbable. “ At this time,” he says, (that is, when 
he was in his twentieth year,) “ I repented of my 
follies, and left off playing chess. I strictly adhered 
to the law, and followed the dictates of religion. I 
also made a vow never to injure any creature ; and 
whenever I did so by chance, was very sorry for it. 
Thus, one day having unintentionally trodden on an 
ant, I felt as if my foot had lost all its power. I con- 
stantly begged the intercession of the first Khalifs, and 
was benevolent to all mankind.”* 
* Memoirs, p. 30. Who would imagine that in his maturer 
years, when these favourable impressions of virtue might have 
been expected to be confirmed within him, he should have order- 
ed the deliberate massacre of a hundred thousand unresisting 
captives ? 
