He is Mīr Muḥammad Khān-i-Kalān, who is well-known by reason of his high rank and position. His assemblies were always attended by learned men and poets. In spite of his constant employment in administrative business he found time occasionally to indulge in the customary recreation of writing verses, and collected a large dīvān of his poems. He used to say to the Emperor, ‘The boast of your reign is this, that a man like me has lived in it.’

The following verses are his:—

“In my youth the flower of my age was passed in ignorance,
And what was left of it has been passed in repentance.
Young man, thou hast sown nothing but the seed of despair
in the world,
Now the season of old age is come, and the time for tillage
is past.”

“Go Ghaznavī, associate with the dogs of the beloved,
Be content with a dry crust and make thyself independent
of the world,
Take the crown of pride from thy head and pass beyond
the stage of ‘we’ and ‘I,’*

Overthrow (in thy mind) the foundations of the kingdom of
this world, like Ibrāhīm, the son of Adham.*
Withdraw thy notice from thyself and thy friends that
thou may be at rest,
And if even the light of thy eyes should meet thee in the
way, turn aside.

When he was governor of Sambhal he gave great vogue to the following ode of Shaikh Sa‘dī* (may his tomb be hallowed):— ²⁸⁸

“The heart which loves and is patient must surely be a
stone,
For love and patience are a thousand leagues apart.”

He himself wrote as follows:—

“When the cupbearer's cheek is rosy with wine,
Drink wine to the sound of the flute, for the heart is sad.”

Mīr Amānī and other poets composed answers to these verses, in imitation of them, each according to his capacity and frame of mind, and one of them, the late Jamāl Khān of Badāon, who was a constant and intimate companion of the Khān, and was un­rivalled in wit, composed an ode of which the following was the opening couplet,

“Thy cheek is ever rosy with the wine of delight,
My heart, like a closed bud, is constricted with grief in
meditating on thy mouth.”

When I was in Kānt-u-Gola* in the service of Ḥusain Khān* this ode reached me one night in a letter from Miyān Jamāl Khān and the next morning news came that he had been seized with colic in the place of public prayer in Sambhal on the ‘Īd-i-Qurbān,* and had sickened suddenly, and in the flower of his youth had surrendered his soul to God. His bier was brought into Badāon. Some mention has been made of this event in the record of the reign,* and besides (the chronograms there given)* the words ‘Ah, Jamāl Khan has died!’ were found to give the date of his death.

In these days* whom have the heavens seated in safety
Whose existence they did not cut short like the morning's light?