This took place in the year nine hundred and thirty-seven. The words Shash-i-Shawwāl* also form the date of his decease, while the date of his birth may be found from this couplet.

Since this revered monarch was born in the sixth of Muḥar­ram,
The year of his birth* also is Shash-i-Muḥarram.

The duration of his reign in Māwarā-annahr, Badakhshān, Kābul, and Kāshghar, as well as in Hindustān, was* thirty-eight years. He had succeeded to the kingdom at the age of twelve, and Khwāja Kalān Bēg wrote this couplet in his funeral ode:

Alas! that time and the changeful heaven should exist with­out thee.
Alas! and Alas! that time should remain and thou should'st
be gone.

Among the learned men of his time is Shaikh Zain Khānī,* who translated in most elegant* style, the Wāqi‘at-i-Bābarī,* which the deceased monarch wrote, and the following verses are by him:

Verses.

^342. Thou hast rested with thy guardians and hast fled from me
What have I done? or what hast thou heard or seen from
me?
There was no necessity for injustice to enable thee to seize
my heart.
I would have yielded it had'st thou but desired it of me.

Verses.*

So straitened did my heart become for longing for those lips
of thine
Too narrow was the way by which my soul should quit its
earthly shrine.

My verses are both rational and traditional, and my desire is, that Maulānā Hasan, who comprises in himself all rational* and traditional science, may hear them.

Another is Maulānā Baqā'ī who wrote a Manavī in the metre of the Makhzan-i-Asrār.* At the moment I do not remember a single poem of his.

Another* is Maulānā Shihābu-d-Dīn the Enigmatist, whose general learning was overshadowed by his special skill in the composition of enigmas, and* at the time when Darmash Khān* was appointed* by Shāh Isma‘īl Ṣafawī Husainī to the Governor­ship of Khurāsān, that prince of traditionists, Mīr Jamālu-d-Dīn, the traditionist, one day while the preaching was going on, in dispelling the apparent contradiction between the sacred word Verily your Lord is God, who created the heavens and the earth in six days,* and that true Ḥadī (tradition) that He created the world in seven days,* explained it in two ways; Maulānā Shihābu-d-Dīn * refuted it, by adducing one after another several excellent arguments, and wrote a treatise on that subject, to which the learned divines of that time subscribed* their signatures. The writer of these pages also on the same occasion wrote a few lines of prose and poetry, from which the following rubā‘ī is selected;*

Quatrain. ^343.

This writing which has appeared like lawful magic,
Its poetry and prose are purer than the purest water.
It is a gleam from the brightness of “the brilliant Star,*
In describing whose dignity the tongue of meditation is struck
dumb.

The following enigma on the name Kāshif is also by him.

Quatrain.

With a view to deceive the heart of this broken-hearted one,
That idol with mouth like the rosebud is every moment*
displaying coquetry.
Upon the leaf of the rose she wrote that curling ringlet
And then displayed her moon-bright face from* one corner.*

The death of the Maulavī took place at the time of the return of the Emperor Muḥammad Humāyūn, whose abode is in Paradise, from his expedition to Gujrāt in the year 942 H., and Mīr Khond* Amīr the historian invented the chronogram Shihābu--āqib. And one of the wonderful* inventions of that Emperor, whose shelter is the pardon of God, is the Kha-i-Bābarī (the Bābarī script), in which writing he indited a copy of the Qur'ān, and sent it to the sacred city of Makka: his anthology of Persian and Tūrkī poetry is well-known. He has also composed a book on the Hanīfite Theology called Mubaiyyin,* and Shaikh Zainu-d-Dīn* wrote a commentary upon it which he entitled Mubīn. His trea­tises * on Prosody are also in common use.

Verse.

The heaven, whose sole skill is oppression,
Has this one object, to wring each moment the heart's blood;
It gives not to the tulip the crown of royalty without laying
low under the foot of oppression the head of a crowned
monarch.