To great learning and knowledge of medicine he united a taste ¹⁶³ for writing vilely scurrilous and satirical verse. His nom-de­plume was Shujā‘ī.* As ill-luck would have it, whenever this physician undertook the cure of a sick man, the unfortunate patient surrendered his life to the messenger of death, for which reason the wits gave him the nickname of Saifu-l-Ḥukamā.* He attended one of the grandsons of the venerable Shaikh Jāmī, Mūḥammad-i-Khabūshānī* by name, better known as Makhdūm-zāda ,* and helped him on his journey to the next world. The words “Saifu-l-Ḥukamā killed him”* were found to give the date of his death. These few lines which were written on the physician Jalāl may well be applied to Saifu-l-Mulūk.

Verses.

“Regarding the physician Jalāl the Angel of Death,
Last night made his complaint to God, saying,
‘Thy slave is helpless before the physician,
Where I kill one he kills a hundred.
Either depose him I pray Thee, from the position which
he holds,
Or assign to me some other employment.’”*

He was held in much honour in India for some years during the time of Bairam Khān, and afterwards, but according to his own statement he received neither patronage nor honour, and returned to his country disappointed. Thence he wrote and despatched a satirical poem, which for gracefulness and the laughable nature of its subject has been equalled by the poems of few writers of this age. To whet the taste of my readers I transcribe here a few couplets from that poem, which recall themselves spontaneously to my memory.

“A pious calf, untimely born, hailing from Barbary,
Whom I have sometimes called a cat, sometimes the mouse
of the saints,
A Brahman without caste-mark or thread, that is to say an
Indian Shaikh.

I should be no Musalman were I to call such a one a
Musalman.
Hold, Shafī‘u-'d-dīn Muḥammad, cease your eternal mum-
bling of words,
That mumbling which I have likened to the chewing of a
cud by a man.
Farīdūn,* in my anger against you, your shameless face
¹⁶⁴ Have I likened to an anvil, not for its smoothness, but for
its hardness.”

Mīr Farīdūn replied with the following couplet:—

“Philosopher's tears are the boast of the ass of the angel of
Death,
Of him whom I have called the doorkeeper of the house of
misfortune.”

When Mīr Mu‘izzu-l-Mulk* left the army and entered upon a life of religious retirement at Dihlī Saifu-l-Mulūk wrote of him:

“The king of the ascetics, Mu‘izzu-l-Mulk, is displeased with
me.
Why, when have I, his slave, ever said that he repented of
his ascetic life?”