YOU write, “that Nursia requires our express authority for joining “[or inserting] your name [with his own] in the [official] letters to “the Aumils.” It is known. When you were dispatched from the Presence, a [certain] mandate, addressed to Nursia, was delivered to you. Open and peruse the same, and conform to its contents. If it be directed therein, that you are to participate with him in the adminis­tration of the revenue business,* you will, agreeably thereto, apply earnestly and constantly, in conjunction with him, to the affairs of the Sircar: If [on the other hand] your participation [therein] should be forbidden,* you must act accordingly.

If I rightly understand this letter, which I have translated as closely as I could, it is a very strange one. I lay no stress upon the apparently singular circumstance of Mahommed Hyder’s being referred to a letter which he could not have in his possession, since he must have already delivered it to Nursia, to whom it was addressed. This difficulty is easily removed, by supposing what is most likely to have been the case, viz. that the letter referred to was only a copy (though not so called in the manuscript) with which the under Dewân had been furnished, for his information and guidance. But what appears extraordinary is, that the Sultan should have placed the question submitted to him on the hypothetical footing he has done, instead of giving a direct answer to it. We cannot imagine him to have really forgotten the orders he had transmitted to Nursia on the subject in dispute or, if he had, that the secretary could not have produced a copy of them: hence it may be inferred, that the present letter was designed in the way of banter. It is pretty evident, from the fact of Nursia’s having refused to admit Mahommed Hyder to the privilege he demanded, without the express authority of the Sultan, that no such authority had been conveyed in the mandate referred to: and this the Sultan, no doubt, very well knew. The letter to Shumsûddeen Khân,* at page 278, seems to have been written in the same vein.