5o, The Poet Mail! of Herat ( ^j* J^ad ) 



By H. Beveridge. 



The life of this poet is but little known, and there are 

 several mistakes and discrepancies in the accounts of him which 

 occur in various Persian anthologies and in catalogues of 

 Persian manuscripts. Mailf is only a takhallas or pen-name, and 

 there were two poets who adopted the sobriquet, besides a third 

 who called himself Malli and was a native of Kashan and is 

 mentioned in the Atishkada (Bombay lithograph, p. 252). The 

 Herat Maill was by far the most celebrated of the two Maills. 

 According to some authorities he was a native of Mashhad, and 

 is buried there, but he was brought up in Herat, and is general- 

 ly known as Maill Haravl. The other was a native of Hisar 

 Shadman in Transoxiana, a town which is also known as Hisar 

 Kuhistanl. He was chiefly a composer of riddles, and only 

 two lines of his verses were known to the anthologists. 



The best account of Maill of Herat is that given in the 

 anthology called the Khulasatu-1-Asha'ar u Zabdau-1-Afkar, 

 a title which was englished by Dr. Sprenger as the " Butter 

 of Poems and the Cream of Conceits. ' ' It was composed by 

 Taqlu-d-din of Kashan between 985 and 1016 A. H. (1577-1608) 

 and is one of the oldest and most valuable of all the anthologies. 

 There are only fragments of it in the British Museum (see Rieu 

 III. 10466, and Supplement No. 105), and the best copy z in this 

 country seems to be that in the India Office and entered in Dr. 

 Ethe's Catalogue under the numbers 667 and 668. No. 667 is 

 a modern copy , in three volumes, of the abridged second edition 

 of the anthology and formerly belonged to John Leyden. But 

 No. 668 is a very valuable and apparently unique copy of the 

 Supplement or Khatima of the first edition, and was made aa 

 early as 993 A.H. (1585), which was the year in which TaqI 

 completed the original. See Eth6's Catalogue No. 668, where 

 Fitzedward Hall, the eminent American Sanskritist and former 



The 



m the R. A.S.J. IX, O. S., p. 126. I presume that his copy is now in 

 the Rylands Library, Manchester. 



