in Lord Lake, who had routed
the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between
Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in
her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the
Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of
royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had passed into
the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on
different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the noblest
of Akbar's dreams.

But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring
power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in
Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive
tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off,
but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be
fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same
process of adaptation, assimilation, and absorption, which had been
going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being
permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian
political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan
domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly
converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent
by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian
races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious
evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set
in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry
between the cults of Shiva and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of
the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by Shivaite
and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know
them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the
persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political
independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most
popular of Hindu gods, and the divine love, of which he was at first the
personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his
human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their
origin from the ancient ideas of sexual dualism immanent in some of the
Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of
the great gods into