ee ee 
18, Translation of a Letter by Abt ’1-Fazl. 
By Lreut.-Cotonet D. C. Paitiorr, Secretary, Board of 
Examiners. 
The letters ! of vis ‘L- ee ‘Allami, the famous minister and sec- 
resent of Akbar, which were once considered the acme of style, are 
urgid, bantbante5 prolix, ici pate milly puerile. His cnsha-pardazi 
oxbibits sonora almost every vice enumerated in paar at 
books on Rhet Rive where sense is sacrificed to s 
proprieties, Sa ist omy barbarities abound ; the thought: an the 
metaphors are confused or strained; while the pnscnst Se of the 
intricate harps nea sears is obscure. One letter be 
“The inhalation of the fragrance of the spring-tide posy of 
heart-to-heart union and oneness, a posy arranged by the garden- 
ers of the summer-house of friendship, and the perusal of the 
series of life-pictures from the gallery of foresight and wisdom, a 
gallery coloured by the painters of the studio of that art which 
oe ms and expands the sige * * * [and so on for ten lines more] 
Us an ornamen of gladsome delight and a source of 
peceeeepanding j joy” apes. ‘Your letter reached me.’ 
ing depends 
allusions known only to the i este but the sentences them- 
selves are often so involved that the writer has entangled himself 
in the Fsctihite of his own verbo it The reader has frequently 
that closes the period. The clauses have then to be bracketed off 
like fractions in Algebra, before the meaning can be disentangled. 
Not infrequently the reader fails to reach his goal, for the writer, 
losing himself in the rape ip of his multiloquence, has never 
arrived at the finite verb a 
A vanes gentleman, manager and editor of a well-know 
ersian n se a once declared to me his inability to qathor 
the mea sy of even two consecutive lines. 

1 His letters were ontienti ~ hte wigsleine ‘aban § s-Samad in AH. 
see They are divided into three parts The first rn letters from 
Akbar to various sovereigns, and also certain royal mandates and circulars ; 
the second, some personal letters of Abi ’l-Fazl; the third, miscellaneous 
sais 
e Akbar Nama, Abi ’1-Fazl states that, as poetry is the salt-cellar 
of ae he has freely sprinkled his writings with cnouations from the poets 
