It must be borne in mind that this verse* Khwesh rā dar silk-i-khuddāmi tū mīkhwāhad falak. (The very heaven wishes to enrol itself among your servants) he has taken from a couplet of the qaṣīdah of Niām Astarābādī, which runs thus,—

Shab nujūm az majma‘-ī-mardum nishān āwarda and
Waz mah i nau tāza ḥarfe darmiyān āwarda and
At night the stars have appeared like an assembly of men
And have brought into their midst a new idea in the shape of
the new moon;
The Shāh of Zangbār has taken his seat upon the throne of ^480.
Empire
And the stars have brought the bow as an offering to him.

Rubā‘ī.

The down which encircles thy cheek is the cause of my dis­traction,
Thy locks are the cause of my helplessness and distress,
That dusky ringlet is bent upon my undoing,
All these charms are the cause of my distraction.

The following is also his:

Come, for the sky has prepared for your pastime*
The sun as the golden gourd, and the crescent-moon as the
hook.*

Bairām Khān has a well-known qaṣīdah with this same rhyme, but in a different metre, of which the following is the opening couplet:—

Verse.

Thy shaft has carried away the loop of the qabaq* from its
hook,
Thy meteor, by the help of the crescent-moon has erased the
form of the Pleiades.

These two opening couplets are derived from the opening couplet of a qaṣīdah by the celebrated Niārī Tūnī. The death of Mullā Jāhī took place in the year 956 H. and was due to some poison which a servant introduced into his cup.

Another poet is Ḥaidar Tūniā'ī, a man of parts, and unequalled in the technicalities of harmony, he had a competent faculty for both poetry and music. He spent the greater part of his life in Hindustān. The lampoon upon the Maliku-l-munajjimīn* of the ^481. time of Humāyūn Pādshāh, which he wrote at Panjgāh, is one of the marvels of the age, and a rarity for all time.

The following opening couplet which he wrote for his threnody on the death of the saintly martyred Imām,* accepted of God, murdered by man, offspring of the Prophet, by descent from the pure* Fāimah, upon them be peace,* is read during the ‘Āshūrā in the assemblies for the commemoration of the death of Husain.*

Verse.

The month of Muḥarram has come and our eyes are constrained
to weep,
We let fall tears of blood at the thought of Ḥusain's parched
lips.*

Rubā‘ī.

Thou art he whom in envy they call the sun and moon,
Thy troops, both horse and foot, they call the moonfaced ones.
Thou art worthy of this, with this grace and beauty of thine,
That all the kings of the age should call thee sovereign lord.

The following is also by him:—

My heart thou hast no friend to compare with sorrow for him,
Thou hast no comfort in life like sympathy for him.

And this:—

Every moment my heart's desire has some fresh allurement,
To bear her coquetry costs my life, what of that? it is her
life.
How can I liken the lips of my love to the bud of the rose,
The bud is tightly pursed it is true, but is dumb and silent.

The son of this man Ḥaidar Tūnī was an arrant coward and spiritless;* accordingly in the months* of the year 985 H. he had ^482. entered the service of Humāyūn; one day he was describing the circumstances of a journey by boat and its terrors, in such a way that the effects of fear were evident from his behaviour.* I asked saying, May be you regret having gone on the Hajj?* and I repeated as appropriate to the occasion that verse which his rivals said to the poet Qudsī.*

Verse.

From the hardships of the desert path, and its thorns,*
Of the coming to the Ka‘bah you are probably repentant.

He replied instantly, “Yea! verily.” The king said, why should he repent of having visited the Ka‘bah, though he may indeed repent of sitting in a ship. At that same moment Mathīn* Khān, the elegant and accomplished mime, in accordance with a hint from the king, made himself up* to represent a mad man bitten by a dog, and began to bark like a dog, and seized Ḥaidar,* and dragged him forward with his turban flying one way and his shoes another. He began running in all directions,* till at last he rolled on the ground, and set them all laughing immoderately. When he learned the truth he was desperately ashamed. The king at­tempted to console him, but it ended by his being obliged to leave Hindustān. Another is Shāh Ṭāhir Khwāndī* Dakkanī, the younger brother of Shāh Ja‘far; the ‘Ulamā of ‘Irāq, however ridicule his pretensions to descent from Khwāndī stock, and have prepared a document bearing upon this question, to which both his opponents and supporters subscribed their signatures,* as is mentioned in the Kāmilu-t-tawārīkh of Ibn Aīr Jaarī,* and also in the Lubbu-t-tawārīkh* of Qāẓī Yaḥya Qazwīnī, and other works. He claimed to be intimately connected with Shāh Ṭahmasp, but eventually he was led, by the abuse which was heaped upon him in connection with the aforesaid claim to relationship,* and the excessive annoyance caused him by Mīr Jamālu-d-Dīn Ṣadr Astarābādī, to proceed to the Dakkan, which is famed as the ^483. refuge for the oppressed, where he met with a favourable recep­tion from Niām Shāh, the ruler of that country, and was re­warded with considerable advancement, and attaining the highest dignities* reached the rank of Jumlatu-l-Mulk (Chief finance-minister of the State). The Shī‘ah tenets spread widely, in fact we may say they were really inaugurated in those regions through the instrumentality of Shāh Ṭāhir.* Niām Shāh Baḥrī, who was afflicted with an incurable* malady of long standing, was cured by the virtue* of a charm pronounced over him by Shāh Ja‘far, and that occurrence, which was in reality was of the nature of Istidrāj, he attributed to the miraculous powers (karāmāt) of Shāh Ja‘far,* and acting upon his instigation abandoned the religious tenets of Sunnat* and Jamā‘at,* which he held as one of the Mah-dawīyah ,* and became a fanatical heretic.* What cruel and vexa­tious treatment as accursed and excommunicate did not these two ill-starred ones* inflict upon the ‘Ulamā and Shaikhs of that land! So that at last their disgraceful conduct led to the expulsion of the true Muslims, and heresy* from that day again became firmly rooted in that country.

Shāh Ṭāhir was in natural descriptive poetry comparable to Niām Astarābādī in astronomical poetry. The following is from one of his qaṣīdahs written in eulogy of Humāyūn Pādshāh. In it he has imitated Anwarī.