INTRODUCTION XVll 



afterwards adopted the life of a recluse. He gives some liint of 

 this in his introduction to the present work. Now when a 

 European catches "religion^' he joins a crowd and makes a noise; 

 he either shouts from a platform in a music-hall, or else beats a 

 drum in the Salvation Army. An Oriental, on the contrary, goes 

 into the wilderness and seeks God in lonely places. So acted 

 " Rangin/' but what the sorrow was that drove him from the 

 abodes of men is not known. He is said to have been a good- 

 looking youth, of prepossessing manners, fond of society, not 

 averse to wine-parties, an entertaining companion, and possessed 

 of a wit, nimble, mischievous, flippant and obscene. He was a 

 pupil of the well-known poet Zahir" 'd-Din, 'Hatim takhallus,' 

 and a friend of the poet Mir * Insha' Allah ^ {takhallus 'Insha^), 

 of Delhi. He was the author of several Dlwctns, four of 

 which are known. Perhaps the best known is one in Urdu, 

 very indecent, which introduces the slang of the harems of 

 Delhi and Lucknow. One of his ribald or flippant poems is a 

 eulogy on the Devil ; it opens with the words Na'uz'^ hi 'lldh instead 

 of the usual Bi 'sm^ 'lldh. Another is entitled " Mihr o Mdh," and 

 is a story of a Sayyid's son and a jeweller's daughter, who lived at 

 Delhi in the reign of Jahangir. Of his prose works, one was called 

 the Majdlis-i Rangin ; in it the author criticized all, or most, of the 

 well-known poets, including Shaykh Sa'di. The popularity of his 

 Fars-Ndma is sufficiently attested by the fact that it has been 

 through many editions. 



^'Rangin" died at the age of eighty, in Jumdda 's-Sdnl, A.H. 

 1251 ( = October A.D. 1835). In the year of his death he stated 

 that he would not survive to see the new year, as his mind had 

 unconsciously composed a tarlJch giving that very year as the date 

 of his decease, adding that a similar prognostication by his master 

 Hatim had proved true. 



NOTES ON TEXT-MATTER 



Notes on the Text-matter. — Some of the receipts in this 

 translation should prove interesting to officers of native cavalry. 

 All that is to be found in these pages is not merely quaint or 

 ridiculous. No sawar shows his horse at darbdr without first 

 administering his favourite spices to make it drink deeply, while 



