Bābur,* in the midst of these intrigues, with which he Death of
Bābur.
Dec. 26,
1530. was probably unacquainted, expired at the Chārbāgh, near Agra, on the 6th of the first Jumāda, A. H. 937, in the fiftieth year of his age, and thirty-eighth of his reign as a sovereign prince.* His body, in conformity with a wish which he had expressed, was carried to Kābul, where it was interred in a hill that still bears his name.* He had reigned five years over part of Hindustān. Humāiūn ascended the throne on the 9th of the same month without opposition, by the influence of Khalīfeh.

His wives.

Though Bābur has given us such a minute account of the wives and families of his uncles and cousins, he has communicated but few particulars regarding his own. It appears that, when only five years of age, he was betrothed to his cousin Āisha Sultan Begum, the third daughter of Sultan Ahmed Mirza, the King of Samarkand, by Kātak Begum. He married her after his first expedition to Samarkand, and had by her one daughter, who died young. They seem to have quarrelled; and Bābur says she was misled by her eldest sister Rabīa Sultan Begum, who induced her to leave his house. Another of his wives was Zeineb [A. D.
1504-5.] Sultan Begum, whom he married after the surrender of Kābul. She also was his cousin, being the fifth daughter of Sultan Mahmūd Mirza, King of Hissār, by Khanzādeh Begum, the grand-daughter of Mīr Buzurg of Termiz. He informs us that he married her at his mother’s desire, that they did not agree, and that in two or three years she died of the small-pox. His third wife, Maasūmeh Sultan Begum, was likewise his cousin, being the sister of his first wife, and the fifth daughter of Sultan Ahmed Mirza by Habībeh Sultan Begum. She saw him at Herāt, during his expedition to Khorasān, and fell in love with him. It was arranged that she should go to Kābul, where he [A. D.
1507.] afterwards married her. She had one daughter, Maasūmeh, of whom she died in childbed. Her daughter, Maasūmeh, joined Bābur in Hindustān, but probably died before him. A. D. 1519. He also, during his campaign in Bajour, married a daughter of Shah Mansūr,* the Malik or chief of the Yūsefzai Afghans. She is said to have survived him, and to have died in the reign of Akber. Bābur seems to have had no children by her. The names of his other wives, and of the ladies of his Aug. 1526. haram, have not been preserved.* He himself mentions the birth of a prince named Fārūk, who probably died young.

His family.

Bābur, at the time of his death, had seven children alive, four sons and three daughters. The names of their mothers are not recorded.* The eldest son, Nasīr-ed-dīn Muhammed Humāiūn, succeeded him as Supreme Emperor in all his dominions. Humāiūn, on his accession, gave to his second brother, Kāmrān Mirza, the Panjāb, in addition to the government of Kābul and Kandahār which he had formerly held; to Hindāl Mirza, who had just arrived from Badakh­shān, he gave the country of Mewāt, and to Askeri he assigned the province of Sambal, which he had himself held. All these princes acted a conspicuous part in the confusions of the succeeding reign. Bābur’s three daughters, Gulrang Begum, Gulchehreh Begum, and Gulbaden Begum, were all by one mother.

His charac-
ter.

Zahīr-ed-dīn Muhammed Bābur was undoubtedly one of the most illustrious men of his age, and one of the most eminent and accomplished princes that ever adorned an Asiatic throne. He is represented as having been above the middle size, of great vigour of body, fond of all field and warlike sports, an excellent swordsman, and a skilful archer. As a proof of his bodily strength, it is mentioned, that he used to leap from one pinnacle to another of the pinnated ramparts used in the East, in his double-soled boots; and that he even frequently took a man under each arm, and went leaping along the rampart from one of the pointed pinnacles to another. Having been early trained to the conduct of business, and tutored in the school of adversity, the powers of his mind received their full development. He ascended the throne at the age of twelve, and before he had attained his twentieth year, the young prince had shared every variety of fortune; he had not only been the ruler of subject provinces, but had been in thraldom to his own ambitious nobles, and obliged to conceal every sentiment of his heart; he had been alternately hailed and obeyed as a conqueror and deliverer by rich and extensive kingdoms, and forced to lurk in the deserts and mountains of his own native king­dom as a houseless wanderer. Down to the last dregs of life, we perceive in him the strong feelings of an affection for his early friends and early enjoyments, rarely seen among princes. Perhaps the free manners of the Tūrki tribes had combined with the events of his early life, in cherishing these amiable feelings. He had betimes been taught, by the voice of events that could not lie, that he was a man dependent on the kindness and fidelity of other men; and, in his dangers and escapes with his followers had learned that he was only one of an association, whose general safety and success depended on the result of their mutual exertions in a common cause. The native benevo­lence and gaiety of his disposition seem ever to overflow on all around him; and he talks of his mothers, his grand­mothers, and sisters with some garrulity indeed, but the garrulity of a good son and a good brother. Of his com­panions in arms he always speaks with the frank gaiety of a soldier; and it is a relief to the reader, in the midst of the pompous coldness of Asiatic history, to find a king who can weep for days, and tell us that he wept, for the playmate of his boyhood. Indeed, an uncommon portion of good nature and good humour runs through all his character, and even to political offences he will be found, in a remarkable degree, indulgent and forgiving.

In the character of the founder of a new dynasty, in one of the richest and most powerful empires on earth, we may expect to find a union of the great qualities of a statesman and general; and Bābur possessed the leading qualifications of both in a high degree. But we are not, in that age, to look for any deep-laid or regular plans of civil polity, even in the most accomplished princes. Bābur’s superiority over the chiefs to whom he was opposed, arose principally from his active disposition and lively good sense. Ambitious as he was, and fond of conquest and of glory in all its shapes, the enterprise in which he was for the season engaged, seems to have absorbed his whole soul, and all his faculties were exerted to bring it, what­ever it was, to a fortunate issue. His elastic mind was not broken by discomfiture, and few princes who have achieved such glorious conquests have suffered more numerous or more decisive defeats. His personal courage was con­spicuous during his whole life, but it may be doubted whether, in spite of his final success, he was so much entitled to the character of a great captain, as of a successful partisan and a bold adventurer. In the earlier part of his career his armies were very small. Most of his expedi­tions were rather successful inroads than skilful campaigns. But he showed a genius and a power of observation which, in other circumstances, would have raised him to the rank of the most accomplished commanders. As he had the sense to perceive the errors which he committed in his earlier years, so, with the superiority that belongs to a great mind, conscious of its powers, he always readily acknowledges them. His conduct, during the rebellion of the Moghuls at Kābul, and the alarm of his army in the war with Rāna Sanka, bears the indications of the most heroic magnanimity. The latter period of his life is one uninterrupted series of successes.

But we are not to expect in Bābur that perfect and refined character which belongs only to modern times and Christian countries. We sometimes see him order what, according to the practice of modern war, and the maxims of a refined morality, we should consider as cruel executions. We find him occasionally the slave of vices, which, even though they belonged to his age and country, it is not possible to regard in such a man without feelings of regret. We are disappointed to find one possessed of so refined an understanding, and so polished a taste, degrading both, by an obtrusive and almost ridiculous display of his propensity to intoxication. It may palliate, though it cannot excuse this offence, that it appears to have led him to no cruelty or harshness to his servants or those around him, that it made him neglect no business, and that it seems to have been produced solely by the ebullition of high spirits in his gay and social temper. We turn from Bābur, the slave of such vices, which probably hastened on a prema­ture old age, and tended to bring him to an early grave, and view him with more complacency, encouraging, in his dominions, the useful arts and polite literature, by his countenance and his example. We delight to see him describe his success in rearing a new plant, in intro­ducing a new fruit-tree, or in repairing a decayed aqueduct, with the same pride and complacency that he relates his most splendid victories. No region of art or nature seems to have escaped the activity of his research. He had cultivated the art of poetry from his early years, and his diwān, or collection of Tūrki poems, is mentioned as giving him a high rank among the poets of his country. Of this work I have not been able to learn that any copy exists.* Many of the odes in it are referred to in his Memoirs, and quoted by the first couplet. A few specimens of his Persian poetry are also given, which show much of that terseness and delicacy of allusion so much admired in the poets whom he imitated. His Persian Masnevi, which he published by the name of Mubīn,* I have never met with, though Abulfazl speaks of it as having a great circulation; nor have I seen his versification of the tract of Khwājeh Ahrār,* which has been already mentioned.* He also wrote a work on Prosody* and some smaller productions, which he sometimes alludes to in his Memoirs. He was skilful in the science of music, on which he wrote a treatise. But his most remarkable work is, undoubtedly, the Memoirs of his own Life, com­posed by him in the Tūrki tongue. The earlier part of them is written with great spirit, and the whole bears strong characteristics of an ingenious, active, and intelligent mind. No history, perhaps, contains so lively a picture of the life and opinions of an eastern prince. The geo­graphical descriptions which he gives of his hereditary kingdom, and of the various countries which he subdued, have, what such descriptions seldom possess, not only great accuracy, but the merit of uncommon distinctness. The Memoirs, however, will be found of unequal value, according to the periods of which they treat. Some years, particularly in the later period of his life, present little more than a dry chronicle of uninteresting events, probably written down as they occurred, and never rewritten, as the earlier period certainly have been. It probably was his intention to have connected the whole, and completed them in the same strain of happy narrative that runs through the first half of them, a design which it is to be regretted that he did not live to execute.