"He is affable and majestical, merciful and sincere. Skilful in mechanical arts, as making guns, etc.; of sparing diet, sleeping but three hours a day, curiously industrious, affable to the vulgar, seeming to grace them and their presents with more respective ceremonies than those of the grandees; loved and feared of his own; terrible to his enemies."

One word more. He invariably administered justice sitting or standing below the throne; thus declaring himself to be the mere instrument of a Supreme Power to which he also owned obedience.

So not without cause did this record begin by calling Akbar a Dreamer.

JAHÂNGIR AND NURJAHÂN

A.D. 1605 TO A.D. 1627

These names, "Conqueror of the World" and "Light of the World," are inseparable.

It is as well they should be so, for they supply us with the only excuse which Prince Salîm could put forward for the curious animosity that for many years went hand in hand with his undoubted affection and respect for his great father, Akbar; the excuse being that he had been crossed in love, real, genuine love, by that father's absurd sense of justice.

The story will bear telling.

There was a poor Persian called Mirza or "Prince" Ghiâss, of good family but abjectly poverty-stricken, who, finding it impossible to live in his own country, determined to emigrate to India with his family. On the way thither, his wife, Bibi Azizan, somewhat of a feckless fashionable, was delivered of another daughter. Already in dire distress, the parents felt unable to cope with this fresh misfortune. So they left the child by the wayside. The chief merchant of the caravan by which they were travelling, happening to come along the same road a few hours afterwards, found the baby, and being struck by its beauty, determined to rear it as his own.

Now in a travelling caravan wet-nurses are rare. Small wonder, then, that the infant, whom the merchant had instantly called the "Queen of Women" (Mihr-un-nissa), should find its way back to its mother. This led to explanations. The merchant, discovering the father to be much above his present position, employed him in various ways, and became interested in his future.

This led to his being brought to Akbar's notice, who, finding him straightforward and capable, advanced him until he rose to be Lord High Treasurer of the Empire. A fine position, truly, especially for Bibi Azizan, who, amongst the ladies of the court, was noted for the dernier cri of fashion both in dress and perfume. It was she, briefly, who invented the attar of rose, which at first sold for its weight in gold.

Now Bibi Azizan was a matchmaking mamma, and in little Mihr-un-nissa she had a pretty piece of goods to bring to market. A thousand pities, indeed, that husband Ghiâss, honest man, had already allowed talk of betrothal with young Sher-Afkân of the King's Light Horse. All the more pity because there was Prince Salîm giving his father trouble despite the Râjput wife they had given him.

That Bibi Azizan cast nets is fairly certain; but it was Fate which sent the bird into them.

It was after one of Akbar's favourite diversions, a Paradise Bazaar, when the lords and ladies of the court had been playing pranks, that Salîm first saw the girl who was, long years afterwards, to be his good genius. The tale may be fully told in verse of how--

Such is the tale which, even nowadays, the women of India love to tell, bewailing the unkind destiny which separated the lovers for nearly twenty years. But, as a matter of fact, there is no evidence to prove that the little Queen-of-Women fell in love with the prince at all. On the contrary, it seems probable that, being a girl of great sense as well as great beauty, she preferred her father's young soldier to her mother's somewhat debauched heir to a throne. Certain it is, however, that the orthodox Mahomedan faction would have viewed with favour the introduction of a Mahomedan bride. Akbar, however, possibly from political motives, ostensibly because of the previous promise, vetoed the match, and giving the young soldier-bridegroom an estate in Bengal, sent him thither with his disturbing wife. Here they seem to have been very happy. But Jahângir did not forget, and the fact that fourteen years afterwards, at least, one of the very first acts of his reign was to send to Bengal, pick a quarrel with Sher-Aikân (who appears to have acted as an honest and upright gentleman by point-blank refusing to be bribed), and treacherously killing him, carry off his wife, makes one pause to wonder whether Jahângir's life might not have been a better one had his inclinations towards this most masterful woman not been thwarted.

It is a curious story altogether, one which needs reading between the lines. Not the least curious part of it being the fact that Jahângir, passionately lustful as he must have been by the time when, as a man of nigh forty, he gained actual possession of Nurjahân, used no force towards her. He accepted her scornful rejection of her husband's murderer, and after months spent in the endeavour to soothe and conciliate her, accepted his defeat.

For six long years Nurjahân lived at the court as one of the attendants of Jahângir's Râjput mother, refusing any pension from the hand of the man who had killed Sher-Afkân, and supporting herself entirely by her exquisite skill in embroidery and painting.

And then?

It is customary to say that ambition overcame her scruples; but the seeing eye, reading between the lines, may find a womanly pity for the man who in the prime of life had lost all control over himself, and who sorely needed help. She was a clever, a fascinating woman; and no woman could quite keep her head before such long constancy as his.

It needed little to bring him back. The story runs, that a single visit to her rooms, where, dressed in the simple white which she always wore after her widowhood, she received him gravely, kindly, was sufficient.

They were married almost immediately, and from that time the woman whom he had first seen as a little maiden beside the fountain was the one over-mastering influence in his life.

Thus before we begin even on Jahângir's career we must concede to him the grace of being a constant lover.

The six years which had passed since he had succeeded to his father had been fairly peaceful ones.

He had found the whole of his vast empire tranquil. The Râna of Oudipur, it is true, was still unvanquished; but the thorn of Chitore had almost ceased to rankle from its sheer persistence. The Dekkan was also disloyal; but there was no pressure of battle, no stress of struggle anywhere, for Jahângir's eldest son, Khushrou (Fair Face), had, after years of open enmity, subsided for the time into sullenness and dejection.

But almost the very first act of Jahângir's administration was one which, as it were, swept away the whole foundation of the empire which Akbar had built up.

He restored the Mahomedan confession of faith to the coins of the realm, thus giving the casting vote to a creed.

It was the first nail in the coffin of Unity.

For the rest, Jahângir evidently did his best for a while. He issued a few edicts, notably one against drug-takers and dram-drinkers, he all the while continuing his notorious habits.

Just before his marriage with Nurjahân, the Dekkan gave him serious trouble. An Abyssinian slave called Malik-Ambêr rose to power and swept all before him, compelling the Imperial troops to retire. But in Bengal peace was restored, and after many successes Oudipur succumbed to a final attack from Prince Khurram, Jahângir's second son, who afterwards reigned as Shâh-jahân. The emperor's delight on this occasion was childlike. In a rather inefficient and unreal diary, which he kept in imitation of his great-grandfather Babar, he records how the very day after the arrival of some captured elephants from Chitore, he sent for the largest of these and "went abroad mounted on Âlam-gomân, to my great satisfaction, and distributed gold in great quantity."

But in all ways he appears to have been blatant, even in his good humours. And these came to the front after his marriage. For Nurjahân was skilful. She held him hard in leash; her ascendency was absolute. It is usual, once more, to discount her influence by asserting its root to have been ambition; but there is absolutely nothing to warrant this assertion. It is true that she raised her own minions to office, that her father held the post of prime minister; but he was wise and just. Nor can there be any doubt that the whole administration improved after Jahângir's marriage. As for his private character, he became, for a time, quite a decent and respectable monarch. If he drank, he drank at night in secret; his day duties were done with decorum.

Meanwhile, the report which a certain Mr Ralph Fitch had brought home to a certain "island set in steely seas" was beginning to bear fruit, and something more than hope of mere commerce filled the sails of the innumerable fleets which, not from England alone, but from Holland also, set forth to break through the monopoly of the shores of Ind which Portugal was endeavouring to maintain. The Dutch succeeded first, and their East India Company was formed in 1602. The first Royal Charter given to an English Trading Company was in 1601, but it was not until 1613 that a fleet of four joint-stock vessels, with Sir Thomas Roe aboard, as accredited ambassador from James I to Jahângir's court at Ajmîr, sailed for India.

The journal of this voyage, written by Sir Thomas Roe himself, is excellent reading, and gives us a quaint picture of life at the court of the Great Moghul. Jahângir himself, dead-drunk as often as not, with the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary hanging to his Mahomedan rosary. A spurious Christianity (deep-dyed by the monkish legends which the Jesuit translators had coolly interpolated into the version of the gospels which Akbar had ordered and paid for!), hustling Hinduism and Islâmism combined. Nurjahân, with trembling lips, no doubt, at times, driving her despot gingerly what way he should go, proud of her power, but weary, a-weary of heart. A beautiful queen, beautifully dressed, clever beyond compare, contriving and scheming, plotting, planning, shielding, and saving, doing all things for the man hidden in the pampered, drink-sodden carcase of the king; the man who, for her, at any rate, always had a heart.

The inconceivable magnificence of it all, the courtesy, the hospitality, the devil-may-care indifference to such trivialities as English merchants or solid English presents! As Sir Thomas Roe writes sadly to his Company:--

"But raretyes please as well, and if you were furnished yearly from Francford, where are all knacks and new devices, £100 would go farther than £500 layd out in England, and here better acceptable."

Thus the rivalry of "made in Germany" is no new thing to India. Sir Thomas himself seems to have been a most excellent, God-fearing man, who was both perplexed and distressed at the attitude of the heathen towards his own faith.

"I found it impossible," he writes, "to convince them that the Christian faith was designed for the whole world, and that theirs was mere fable and gross superstition. There answer was amusing" (?) "enough. 'We pretend not,' they replied, 'that our law is of universal application. God intended it only for us. We do not even say that yours is a false religion; it may be adapted to your wants and circumstances, God having, no doubt, appointed many different ways of going to Heaven.'"

Whether amusing or not, the argument was singularly unanswerable!

One of Sir Thomas Roe's most striking sketches is that of Prince Khurram, who moved through the court, a young man of five-and-twenty, cold, disdainful, showing no respect or distinction of persons; "flattered by some, envied by others, loved by none." "I never saw," writes the ambassador, "so settled a countenance, or any man keep so constant a gravity."

Sir Thomas Roe was not by any means the only Englishman at court. Captain Hawkins had come thither nearly six years before, and had--Heaven knows why!--been beguiled by the capricious king into remaining, on the promise of a high salary. More than once he had attempted to escape in various ways; but even his plea that he lived in fear of poison was met by Jahângir with almost ludicrous firmness, and the presentation of a "white mayden out of his palace, so that by these means my meats and drinks should be looked into."

Poor Hawkins! His protest that he would take none but a Christian girl was of no avail. An orphan Armenian was promptly found, and the discomfited Captain could only write home:--

"I little thought a Christian's daughter could be found; but seeing she was of so honest a descent, and having passed my word to the king, could not withstand my fortunes. Wherefore I tooke her, and, for want of a minister, before Christian witnesses I marryed her; the priest being my man Nicolas; which I thought had been lawful, till I met with a preacher that came with Sir Harry Middleton, and he, showing mee the error, I was newly marryed againe."

An honest soul, apparently, this Captain Hawkins. Sir Harry Middleton was hardly so virtuous, for, disappointed in his desire to establish a factory at Surat, he started with his little fleet for piracy on the High Seas, waylaying other people's golden galleons! But all round the coast, nibbling, as it were, at India's coral strand, were strange ships out of strange nations, seeking for a foothold, seeking for merchandise, for money.

But of this the emperor took no notice; neither did his far more able son, Prince Shâhjahân. Backed by all Nurjahân's influence, he was fast superseding his father in a dual administration, leaving the latter free to amuse himself in Kashmir. But the death of Ghiâss, Nurjahân's father, about the year 1620, brought about complications. His sound good sense, his justice, had so far kept the impulsive womanhood of the empress inline with policy. Now she suddenly betrothed her daughter by her first husband to Prince Shariyâr, the youngest of Jahângir's sons, and naturally threw over the Knight-of-the-Rueful-Countenance, in whose inflexibility she saw danger to her own power. For Jahângir was ill of asthma, and like to die.

Aided by her brother, she set to work instantly to sow dissension between father and son, to such purpose that Shâhjahân, till then the undoubted heir-apparent, his father's fighting right hand, was forced to take refuge in the Dekkan, which once more was in the act of throwing off allegiance to the Moghul.

Having thus disposed, for the time being, of the inconvenient heir, Nurjahân took her emperor to Kashmîr, where, no doubt, he enjoyed himself, for he returned thither the next year. He was, however, living in a fool's paradise, while Nurjahân, bereft of her father's shrewd eyes and Shâhjahân's haughty insight, was but poor protection for a debauched and drunken monarch.

So one dawning the crisis came. Mohabat Khân, whilom Governor of Bengal, a worthy and excellent man, fell into disgrace with the empress. His son-in-law, sent to beg forgiveness, was bastinadoed and returned to him, face towards tail, on an ass.

So it came to pass that while the imperial camp, conveying the emperor to a summer in Kâbul, was marching northward, there followed behind it a half-defiant, half-repentant chieftain, commanding some five thousand stalwart Râjputs.

A word might have brought him to obedience once more; but the imperial camp was large, and proud, and self-confident. So Mohabat bided his time. There was a bridge of boats over the Jhelum River, nigh where the bridge stands now, and after the usual custom, the imperial troops, marching at nightfall, spent the dark hours in crossing and preparing the new camp on the opposite bank.

Thus by dawn little was left but the scarlet-and-gold imperial tents, wherein Majesty lay sleeping; a drunken sleep, it is to be feared.

This was Mohabat's opportunity. He swooped down, overpowered the guards at the bridge, burnt some of the boats, cut others adrift, and then awoke the confused monarch.

One can picture the scene. A protesting prince in pyjamas begging to be allowed to dress in the women's tents, and so gain a few words with his ever-ready counsellor. Mohabat wilily refusing; and so out into the dawn, down by the river-bed, with the red flush paling to primrose in the sky, and the wild geese calling from every patch of green pulse, a disconsolate despot bereft of his guide.

The empress, however, discovering her loss, was nothing daunted. She put on disguise; somehow--Heaven knows how!--managed to cross the Jhelum, and finding her generals somewhat doubtful, somewhat chill, upbraided them for allowing their rightful king to be stolen before their very eyes. That night an attempt was made to rescue him by a nobleman called Fedai-Khân, who swam the river at the head of a small body of horse; but it failed, and half the party was drowned.

Next morning, Nurjahân, having succeeded in rousing the army to a sense of its duty, herself headed a general attack. There was no bridge; the only ford was a bad one, full of dangerous deep pools. But the rashness of impulse was leader, and the woman was amongst the first to land of a whole army, drenched, disordered, dispirited, with powder damp, weighed down with wet clothes and accoutrements.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Nurjahân herself was as a fury. Her elephant circled in by enemies, her guards cut down, balls and arrows falling thick around her howdah, one of them actually hitting her infant grand-daughter, Prince Shahriyar's child, who was seated in her lap. A strange place, in truth, for a baby, unless it were put there as a loyalist oriflamme. Then, her driver being killed, and leviathan cut across the proboscis, the beast dashed into the river, sank in deep water, plunged madly, sank again, and so, carried down-stream, finally found shore; and the empress's women, looking to find her half-drowned, half-dead with fear, discovered her busy in binding up baby's wound.

Bravo, Nurjahân! One can forgive much for this one touch of grand-motherhood.

Of course she was beaten; whereupon she gave up force and instantly went to join her husband in the guise of a dutiful wife. It was her only chance of regaining him, and her empire over his enfeebled brain.

Already she was almost too late. Mohabat had been before with her, had treated him with deference, with profound respect, had made him see that she was the cause of all his troubles--which was hardly the case. Anyhow, she was met point-blank with an order for her execution.

Even this did not daunt her courage. She only asked for permission to kiss her lord's hand before death.

Grudgingly assent was given; it could not well be withheld. And one sight of her was enough. Jahângir's heart had really been hers ever since, as a boy, she had defied him in that matter of the doves.

Perhaps--who knows?--she may have stood before him--guilefully--in the very attitude in which she had stood while Love flitted from the listless hand of Fate; and all that Mohabat could do was to bow low and say: "It is not for the Emperor of the Moghuls to ask in vain."

So Nurjahân was once more in her old place beside the drunkard, free to begin again with her fine, feminine wiles. It did not take her long to undermine Mohabat's influence. Within six months her intricate intrigues bore fruit. Jahângir, whose person was so watched and guarded that he was practically a prisoner, was spirited away by a muster of Nurjahân's contingent in the middle of a review, and Mohabat having thus lost his hostage was compelled to come to terms.

One of these being an extremely guileful one, namely, that the ex-Governor of Bengal should turn his military capacity to the crushing of Shâhjahân, who was beginning to give trouble in the Dekkan.

This policy of the Kilkenny cats seemed to promise peace, and, relieved of all anxiety, the emperor and empress set off for their annual visit to Kashmîr. But this time death lurked amid the purple iris fields which they loved so well. The asthma from which Jahângir had suffered for many years became alarming. What were the floating gardens of the Dhal Lake, the Grove of Sweet Breezes, or the Festival of Roses to a monarch who could not draw his breath? They tried to get him back to the warmer climate of the plains, but he died almost ere he left the valley, being carried dead into the tent on one of the high uplands of the Himalaya.

So ended the reign, and with it, Nurjahân's. She made no effort to enter public life again; she put on the white robes of widowhood, and spent her days in prayer and charity, a sufficient answer to those who charge her with personal ambition. As far as India is concerned, Jahângir's was a neutral influence, except for that one first act of his, that rehabilitation of the Mahomedan formula. Under this, the whole of Akbar's dream of unity was dissolving into thin air. Yet the danger which perhaps he had foreseen, against which he had, perhaps, attempted to guard India, was becoming every day more dangerous.

The vultures--or, let us say, the eagles--were gathering over the carcase. From Holland, from Portugal, from England, even from France, came galleons, like birds of prey eager to carry off the riches of the East.

So for picturesque purposes we can think of this reign as of the picture of a man, pampered, bloated, half-drunken, looking in the lazy sunlight at the figure of a woman round whose head doves flutter amongst the hawks.

Jahângir's famous drinking-cup, cut from a single ruby about 3 inches long, after passing from hand to hand for many years down to the last century, has finally and mysteriously disappeared.

In some ways it would be worth while once to drain the good wine of Shiraz from the glowing red heart of that fatal cup which bears on it, in fine gold characters, a single name.

They say it is "Jahângir"--Or is it "Nurjahân"?

SHÂHJAHÂN

A.D. 1627 TO A.D. 1657

The Knight-of-the-Rueful-Countenance in his youth, remarkable for his lack of amiability, Shâhjahân's character appears to have changed to cheerfulness from the moment when, at the age of thirty-seven, he ascended the throne.

It was immediately evident also that not without purpose had he sate at the feet of that Gamaliel of administrative ability, Akbar. Without his grandfather's genius, a man, in brief, of infinitely lower calibre all round, he is yet palpably a lineal descendant of the Great Moghul. In reading of him we are continually reminded of that grandfather to whom he was so much attached, that when in the hour of Akbar's death he was urged by his father to follow his example and flee the court for fear of assassination by those who were pushing Prince Khûshru's claim, he replied proudly "that his father might do as he chose, but that he would watch by Akbar till the last."

It may be that this devotion had not been disinterested, and that disappointment at not being chosen to succeed may have had something to do with the moroseness of the young prince; but, on the other hand, it may have been the hidden impatience of knowing that filial affection, honour, everything his grandfather (who had been his boyhood's hero) held most dear compelled him to bide Nature's time for kingship, that made the long years seem wasted. For Jahângir's government was not good; after a very few years the whole administration of the country had visibly declined. It rose again under Shâhjahân, and some historians go as far as to say that, although "Akbar excelled all as a law-maker, yet for order and arrangement, good finance and government in every department of State, no prince ever reigned in India that could be compared to Shâhjahân." One thing is certain. India during his time was peaceful, easeful, and prosperous.

One reason for this is not hard to trace. Europe for the first time had really entered the Indian markets, and the superfluities it found there were being paid for in gold. There had been a time of truce, as it were, between the Dutch and the English after the massacre at Amboyna--a needless and brutal massacre which still stands to the discredit of the Dutch. England had threatened war, Holland had promised redress, and so the long years passed by, giving opportunities of commerce to both sides. But it was not until the seventh year of Shâhjahân's reign that the firmân granted by Jahângir to Thomas Roe, authorising the English to trade in Bengal, was acted upon, and a factory (as such trading centres were called) opened at Pepli, close to the estuary of the river Hugli.

That the commerce was growing by leaps and bounds may be judged from the fact that the original East India Company had to petition Parliament first; to restrain their own servants from taking undue advantage of a regulation which permitted a certain fixed limit of private trade; and secondly, against the formation of another trading company to the East India's. The chief cause of complaint made about the original one being its failure to fortify its factories, and so "provide safety or settledness for the establishment of traffic in the said Indies, for the good of posterity." Whence it may be observed that the policy of "pike and carronade" was beginning to find favour. For Charles I. granted a charter to this new company; whereupon time was lost, as well as tempers, in the consequent conflict of interests. The record written by the French physician, Francois Bernier, of his "Travels and Sojourn in the Moghul Empire," gives us clear insight as to what was happening in this first organised attempt of the West on the East. Scarcely a page passes without reference to new efforts of the Portuguese to outwit England, England to outwit Portugal, and of both to double-dam the Dutch. And behind all were the refuse leavings of all three nations, mixed up with Malays, Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, in the redoubtable persons of the Pirates of Arracan; those foremost of buccaneers, who swept the Indian seas and harried its coral strands. Bernier's description of them is worth recording, as it shows graphically how the cancer of commerce and so-called civilisation was eating into the dreamful, slothful, ease-loving body-politic of the whole peninsula.

"The Kingdom of Arracan has contained during many years several Portuguese settlers, a great number of Christian slaves, or half-cast Portuguese and other Europeans collected from various parts of the world. That kingdom was a place of refuge for fugitives from Goa, Ceylon, Cochin, Malacca, and other settlements ... and no persons were better received than those who had deserted their monasteries, married two or three wives, or committed other great crimes.... As they were unawed and unrestrained by the Government, it was not surprising that these renegades pursued no other trade than that of rapine and piracy. They scoured the neighbouring seas in light galleys, entered the numerous arms of the Ganges, ravished the islands of Lower Bengal; and, often penetrating forty or fifty leagues up the country, surprised and carried away the entire population of villages on market days, and at times when the inhabitants were assembled for the celebration of a marriage, or some other festival.... The treatment of the slaves thus made was most cruel.... By a mutual understanding, the pirates would await the arrival of the Portuguese ships, who bought whole cargoes at a cheap rate; and it is lamentable to reflect that other Europeans have pursued the same flagitious commerce with the Pirates of Arracan, who boast that they convert more Hindus to Christianity in a twelve-month than all the missionaries in India do in twelve years."

Not a pleasing picture, though it whets the curiosity to know more, for instance, of the career of Fra Joan, the Augustine monk who, having by means unknown possessed himself of the island of Sundiva, reigned there King-of-the-Pirates for many years.

It was the encouragement given to these scourges of the seas which brought down on the Portuguese the vengeance of Shâhjahân, whose laconic reply to the complaint of his governor in Bengal against their new factory at Hugli is delightful in its peremptoriness, pathetic in its pride: "Expel those idolaters from my dominions!"

Easier said than done, even though the image-decorated church at Agra, which had been built in the reign of Akbar, and the newer one with chimes in its steeple, which had been erected at Lahôre in Jahângir's time, could easily be demolished. Still Hugli could be besieged and captured, and no doubt the success made a subject for general rejoicing. For above all things Shâhjahân delighted in fireworks; that is to say, he had a perfect passion for expensive entertainments, for gorgeous processions, for magnificent buildings. Half the architectural sights of to-day in Northern India are due to Shâhjahân's lavish love of beauty. Some of his fêtes, again, are estimated to have cost over a million and a half sterling. The famous peacock throne, of which Tavernier, a French jeweller by profession, asserts--with apparent credence--that it was commonly supposed to have been worth nearly six and a half millions, was constructed by this king's orders.

The question rises insistently: "How came the Emperor of India by such enormous wealth?" The answer is curiously simple: "L'etat c'est moi."

The State was the Emperor, or rather the Emperor was the visible State. Every atom of imperial revenue passed through his hands for distribution. Not in precise pay to clerks and collectors, to magistrates and ministers, departments and divisions, but in lavish gifts and prodigal scatterings abroad over the land. Whence the gold, gaining circulation, filtered down in smaller payments, smaller giftings. It was a quaint, but not a bad method of making the king the Fount-of-all-Goodness, the veritable Father-of-his-people. Indeed, Shâhjahân was counted, despite the fact that he spent the three-and-twenty millions sterling of revenue in right imperial fashion, to have been an economical king, getting his full money's worth in all ways. Nor was he privately an inordinately rich man, for Bernier states that when he died his whole personal estate was worth about six millions. Thus, while we read of peacock thrones, of marvellous mosques, of three millions spent without regret on a mausoleum, of half that sum squandered in what we have called fireworks, it is necessary to readjust our Western vision, and see public utility behind the personal extravagance. In fact the spectacle of Shâhjahân, the most magnificent of monarchs, raises the problem as to how far a millionaire's reckless squandering of a sovereign injures that coin of the realm for its final purpose of bringing bread to a hungry mouth.

Regarding the actual events of Shâhjahân's reign, there is very little to say. The Dekkan--in which we can now include the whole southward country down to Cape Cormorin, the hitherto unsurveyed, unrecorded triangle forming the apex of India having, chiefly by the nibbling of foreigners along the entire seaboard, by this time come into the equation--was as ever unsettled. It had, even in Akbar's time, been nothing more than a fief of the Crown, and though under his system it would doubtless have become in time an integral part of the empire, it was gradually making once more for independence. So, naturally, there was trouble in the Dekkan. The Râjputs, however, seem to have been fairly quiescent, and the chief disturbances of Shâhjahân's time were the constant quarrels of his four sons, Dâra, Shujah, Aurungzebe, and Morâd. These, with four daughters, Pâdshâh or Jahanâra Begum, Roshanrâi Begum, and two others, were undoubtedly the children of one wife; nor is there mention of others, so if it be true that Mumtâz Mahal, to whose memory the Tâj was built, died in giving birth to a thirteenth child, many of her family must have died, or been done away with in infancy; legend says the latter, Shâhjahân being three parts Râjput. It was, curiously enough, Shâhjahân's absolute adoration for his eldest daughter, Pâdshâh or Jahanâra Begum, which was the cause of England's first hold on Bengal. She was badly burnt in attempting to save a favourite companion, and an English doctor, Gabriel Boughton, hastily summoned from Surat, asked and received as his fee, the right for Great Britain to trade in Bengal.

To return to the sons. Dâra, the eldest, is drawn by Bernier in fairly pleasing colours. Frank and impetuous, liberal in his opinions, he made enemies with one hand while he made friends with the other, while his open profession of the tenets held by his grandfather Akbar, and the writing of a book to reconcile Hindu and Mahomedan doctrines, alienated the orthodox from his cause. Shujah, by his father's estimate, was a mere drunkard; Morâd, the youngest, a sensualist. There remains Aurungzebe. He was an absolute contrast to Dâra. A small man, with a big brain and absolutely no heart. A man of creeds and caution, of faith and faithlessness. He had what historians call an "early turn for devotion." In a thousand ways--and those the least estimable--he reminds one of Cromwell; Cromwell without his magnificent sincerity of purpose.

The history of the mutual misunderstandings and divisions and coalitions of these princes is indeed a weary one. Only Dâra comes out of it with comparatively clean hands. Indeed, in the last act of the drama of Shâhjahân's actual reign of thirty years our sympathies go entirely with Dâra, as he struggles to maintain his own future position, and still uphold that of the sick king.

As this final incident is an excellent example of what in lesser degree had been going on for years, it may be given with advantage. Shâhjahân was in his sixty-seventh year. His sons, therefore, all but the youngest, Morâd, touched and overpassed forty. His eldest, Dâra, had for some time had a large share in the Government, both as heir-apparent, and also because his father in his old age had turned to wine and women. Pâdshâh Begum, the elder daughter, to whom the aged emperor had devoted attachment, unbounded affection, was ever on her brother's side. Shujah, the second son, was Viceroy in Bengal; Prince Morâd, the youngest, Viceroy in Guzerât. Aurungzebe was occupied in Golconda carrying the Moghul arms into the diamond country.

Thus Dâra, on his father's sudden and dangerous sickness--of the cause of it the less said the better--found himself able for a time, with his sister's help, to keep all knowledge of the king's danger from spreading throughout the country. But as Pâdshâh Begum was Dâra's ally, so Roshanrâi, the younger sister, was fast friend to Aurungzebe. Through her he learnt the truth, and instantly took his part cautiously, diplomatically. He did not instantly proclaim himself king, as Shujah and Morâd did in their several viceroyalties when the news also reached their ears. He stood aside and waited, while Shujah marched with his army to engage Dâra, and then wrote to his younger brother Morâd one of the most fulsome letters of flattery ever penned, declaring that he, and he alone, was fit for the crown, and offering him the service of one who, weary of the world, was on the eve of renouncing it, and indulging the devotion of his nature by retirement to Mekka! Morâd must have been a fool to have swallowed the bait, but swallow it he did; and with this cat's-paw puppet in front of him, Aurungzebe, with their conjoined armies, moved to Agra, whence Shujah had been driven back by Dâra into Bengal. The old king was by this time convalescent, and, finding Dâra, instead of taking advantage of his illness, was, on the contrary, ready to yield up his brief regency with cheerfulness, was inclined to trust his eldest son more than ever. He therefore consented, somewhat against his own will, to the latter trying conclusions at once with the Morâd-Aurungzebe confederacy. Fortune went against him. During the battle Aurungzebe, who asserted that he warred alone against the irreligious, the heretical, the scandalous Dâra, was loud in prayerful protestations that God was on their side; after it he fell on his knees and thanked Divine Providence for the victory and the round thousand or so of souls sent below. Dâra fled, and three days afterwards Aurungzebe marched into Agra, coolly imprisoned the aged king in the fort, and having now no further use for Morâd, invited him to supper, plied him with drink (waiving his own pious scruples for the time), so, when hopelessly intoxicated, disarmed him in favour of chains, and packing him on an elephant, despatched him as a State prisoner to Selimgarh, the mid-river fort at Delhi! So ended poor, foolish Morâd's dream of kingship; nor was his life much more prolonged, for shortly afterwards he was executed in prison on a trumped-up charge. Shujah escaped a like fate by disappearance, and poor Dâra, after unheard-of dangers, difficulties, trials and terrors, met with a worse one.

But this record belongs to the reign of Aurungzebe, the man without a heart.

Shâhjahân, meanwhile, remained for seven years a captive in the fort, old, decrepid, tearful, counting his jewels, and comforted by his daughter, Pâdshâh Begum.

A sad ending this, for a man who had been the most magnificent monarch who ever sate upon the throne of India. But all his energies, all his capabilities seem to have deserted him. He made no effort to reassert his kingship, and what is still more strange, no friend or companion, no minister, no adherent, attempted it for him. Utterly deserted by all save his daughter, he died seven years afterwards, in 1665, and was buried at his own request beside his wife in the Tâj Mahal, that most marvellous monument of marriage which the world has ever seen.

And out of this there springs to light for the seeing eye a pitiful story which brings back a pulse of human sympathy for the man whose old age was so sordid, so degenerate.

How many years was it since with bitter grief he had buried the wife to whom he was so devotedly attached that history declares he kept faithfully to her, and to her only, till death did them part?

It was four-and-thirty years since the daughter she was bearing to him cried--so the story runs--ere it was born, and within a few hours, Ârjamund the Beloved lay dead with her still-born babe.

A tragedy indeed! Think what it means! Long years of hardship, exile, wandering, and then four only--four short years of content, of kingship, in which to heap comforts, luxuries, on the woman whom you love--who has borne with you the heat and burden of the day.

That was Shâhjahân's fate. But the history of these Moghul kings, these Great Moghuls whose name still lingers in conjunction with that of the Grand Turk and Bluebeard as something slightly shocking and decidedly despotic so far as women are concerned, is curiously disconcerting to one's preconceived ideas on this counter.

Babar, whose Mahum met him after long years "at midnight," as with bare head and slipper-shoon he ran to catch the earliest glimpse of her along the dusty road. Humâyon, whose sixteen-year-old bride, Hamida, wedded in hot love-haste, brought him his first son at the age of thirty-eight. Akbar, who, after a brief youth of normal passion, settled down into the life of an anchorite. Shâhjahân, who built the Tâj, who spent twenty-two years of his life in gathering together every conceivable beauty to lay at the dead feet of a woman who bore him thirteen children.

These are not the records which we should have expected from a line of Eastern kings.

Regarding this same monument of marriage, the Tâj. So much has been said about it, that little remains to say. Perhaps the most bewildering thing about its beauty is the impossibility of saying wherein that beauty lies. Colour of stone, purity of outline, faultlessness of form, delicacy of decoration--all these are here; but they are also in many a building from which the eye turns--and turns to forget.

But once seen, the Tâj--whether seen with approval or disapproval--is never forgotten. It remains ever a thing apart. Something which the world cannot touch with either praise or blame--something elusive, beyond criticism in three dimensional terms.

It was Shâhjahân who first thought of it; but who designed, who built it?

The very question brings a certain revulsion. It is impossible to dislocate one stone of the Tâj from another, to think of it in fragments, as anything than as a perfect whole.

No! it was never built. It is a bit of the New Jerusalem which some yellow Eastern dawn coming after a velvet-dark Eastern night, found standing, as it stands now, amid the cypresses of the garden.