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also endowed lands for the maintenance of the students, philoso- 

 phers, and learned men, whom his munificence attracted to the 

 capital; and several of his successors emulated his example. 



Such were the effects of the Afghan victories over the Hindoos; 

 these invaders maintained their conquests until the end of the 

 thirteenth century, when the Moguls, or Mogul Tartars, com- 

 menced their ravages, and entered some of the northern districts 

 of the Afghan empire; and in 1397, the celebrated Tim ur-lung, 

 Timur the lame, or Tamerlane, crossed the Indus, and laid waste 

 the adjacent provinces. We must not judge of this conqueror 

 from Rowe's tragedy of Tamerlane; whatever may be the stage 

 effect, it is not founded upon truth: history represents him with 

 an almost unexampled ferocity, depopulating kingdoms, burning 

 cities, and murdering their inhabitants, to gratify his boundless 

 ambition, intolerant zeal, and sanguinary disposition ; Mogul 

 annals paint him grasping the empire of Hindostan through seas 

 of blood. I will relate only one instance of Timur's cruelty from 

 the many which blast his laurels. When he was attacked by the 

 Afghans before the citadel of Delhi, there were upwards of an 

 hundred thousand prisoners in his camp, taken after he crossed 

 the Indus. On hearing that some of them had expressed satis- 

 faction on this occasion, the inhuman tyrant issued an order to 

 put all above the age of fifteen to death; on that day of horror 

 the greater part of those miserable captives were destroyed. After 

 the conquest of Delhi, he ordered a massacre no less cruel, on the 

 wretched inhabitants of that devoted city, in which he spared 

 neither age, nor sex, nor condition. Such conduct procured him 

 the title of Hillak Khan, the " destroying prince;" yet this is 



VOL. III. u 



