1918.) The Poet Shaikh Mufakhkhar-al-din Azari. 467 
necessitated both by the metre and by the pun which he de- 
sires to perpetrat 
A 
when he was on his way from Herat to ‘ Iraq and as having 
profited much by the advice and instruction which he received. 
He offered the Shaikh a bag of gold, which was not accepted. 
Firishta tells us that Azari, when bidding farewell to 
Ahmad Shah, promised to continue his epic, the Bahman-nama, 
ditions made ‘by him during the year to the poem, for which 
aiman-nama was continued in this manner, by its original 
author, until the reign of Humayin Shah, the eleventh king of 
the Bahmani dynasty, who died in a.H. 865 (A.D. 1461), and 
Was then continued by Mulla Naziri and Mulla Samii and 
afterwards by various other poets, some of whom dishonestly 
claimed the whole as their work, until the Bahmani dynasty 
“ame to an end with the puppet Kalim Allah Shah in a.p. 1526. 
Shaikh Azari died, at the age of eighty-two, in A.H. 866 
(4.D. 1461-62), and was buried in Isfarayin. Khyaja Ahmad, 
ustaufi, composed the following epitaph for him :— 
¥ (s! ahs ik cae ae ail—aj ade cout L—asyo 
Hy Sty G5l— ae els Giga cli ie op hye 
“ Alas for our Azari! Shaikh ot his day, 
“ The lamp of whose life is extinguished and cold : 
“The lamp of whose life was illumed with a ray h 
“ From the lamp of his heart, in which shone divine truth: 
Een Khusrav ne’er sang more divinely than he : 
“ And in “Khusrav ” the date of his death we ad see. 
_ The reference is, of course, to the poet Amir Khusrav 0 
Pil and the chronogram gives the date 600 + 60 ays re 
66. In the first hemistich we should, I think, read eit 
cite, 
lt 
the third son of 
d himself in Fars 
Babur Bahadur, 
Zi-l-Hijjah 14. 
ta 
in ay 0( the third son of Taimar. a = a 
at Ch:-.._ '4-D. 1446-47) and was slain by his brother, 
in natin, about 37 dea north-west of Mashhad, on 
855 (Jan. 7, 1459), 
