238 The Kirán-us-Sd \lain of Mír Khusrau. [No. 3, 



occupied him six months, it was finished in the month Ramazan of 

 the jear A. H. 688 corresponding to our A. D. 1289. The poet was 

 then in the 37th year of his age and the number of baits in the poem 

 he states to be 3944. 



Then follows a description of the king's triumphant entry into his 

 capital, and in the closing chapter the poet expresses himself as 

 weary of making poetry, and declares, that he did not write the poem 

 for the sake of gold hutfame. " If the king gave me the treasures 

 of Farídún and Jamshíd, they would be a poor payment for one letter, 

 my desire for this highly decorated book is that my ñame may 

 remain high in its place." The poem then ends with the usual moral 

 reflections on the vanity of wasting life in the composition of verse 

 and devotion to earthly objects. 



Ñor are these last commonplaces wholly inapplicable. The book 

 is curious, rather for what it professes to be, than for what it is ; it 

 reminds us too much of what it misses, to be really a good poem. 

 We read the simple account in Ferishta's plain prose, and we feel 

 that the poet would have shewn a truer knowledge of his craft, 

 had he kept closer to the actual facts as they occurred ; and, little as 

 he has deviated from them, every deviation is a positive blemish in 

 his work. We miss too in the poem the evil genius of the true history, 

 the treacherous vizier Nizám-ud-Dín, whose secret machinations had 

 produced the lamentable rupture from the first. The poet's moral 

 cowardice could only venture to disguise this power " behind the 

 throne," and his characters act without sumcient motives in his pages ; 

 he dared not depict the arch villain* of the court, for the vizier had 

 returned to Dehlí in unbroken influence with the king. It was he 

 who had endeavoured, by every means, to exaspérate the parties into 

 an open rupture, and to stop every attempt at pacific negociations ; 

 and when Baghrá Khan had appealed too strongly to his son's un- 

 hardened heart to be wholly unheard, the vizier had endeavoured to 

 frústrate all the good eífects of the interview. He had drawn a line 



* The only allusion to him iii the poem is perhaps in certain secret instructions 

 and counsels of state which are two or three times mentioned in the interviews 

 between Kai Kobád and Násir-ud-Dín. Zíá Barni'gives long secret dialogues 

 between the king and his father, where the latter warns his son against the 

 miaiater's treachery. 



