________________
INTRODUCTION. -0- This short poem of "Akabar" was composed by me some eight or nine years ago and submitted to the well known "Dakshina Prize Committee of Poona, who, as an encouragement to the cultivation of Marathi poetry, award- ed a handsome prize to the writer. Since that distant date, the manuscript had been lying in the drawers of my table, and its fate seemed doubtful. It is essentially the production of boyhood's fancy, and is, therefore naturally destitute of much historical truth. Although it is, in general, based on history, its historical value is not very considerable. But the business of the poet is distint from that of the historian. "Where the historian bound by an oath to the severest truth in every single statement may at the most permit us to devine the causes of events and the motives of actions from the bare naration of facts, the poet, who seeks to draw from these facts only a general moral truth and not one of fact, unites by poetie fiction, the actions and the actors in a distinct living relation of cause & effect; .... .... the more freely and boldly he does this, the more poetically in- teresting will his treatment of the history become, but the more will it lose its historical value; the more closely and truly he adheres to reality, the more will his poetry gain in historical meaning but forfeit in poetical splendour." This extract, from a well known Shakespearian critic, will, I hope, sufficiently explain my position. At the time, when I wrote this piece, I had on the tablet of my memory a record of all the popular tales and legends of the life of Akabar and his reign. All these I connected
