Later Mughals v1.c4.s2.t2.1

v1.c4.s2.t2.1

But students of Indian history must lament that Mr. Irvine ever set his hand to the *Storia* and the *Army of the Indian Moghuls*; these books prevented the continuation of *The Later Mughals* to the date, 1765, after which the Persian records cease to be of first-rate value and we get full light from the documents in the European tongues. In these Persian records lay the special strength of Mr. Irvine. He had spent a life in collecting, mastering and arranging them; and his death robbed the world of all his garnered knowledge. His successor in the same field will have to begin at the very beginning and to spend years in going over the same materials, and can hope to arrive at Mr. Irvine’s position only after twenty years of preliminary study. If Mr. Irvine had rigorously shunned all such diversions of his attention and pushed on with his grand work, he could in his remaining years have placed on record his life’s accumulation of information and reflection on the decline and fall of the Mughal Empire, and completed its history at least up to its practical extinction about the middle of the 18th century. But he has not done it; and for years to come we have little chance of his unfinished task being carried to completion with anything approaching the high standard of fulness and accuracy he attained in the portion he lived to write. In this respect the world is distinctly the poorer for his having undertaken to edit Manucci.