Note 2 — Preface.

“The Memoirs of Bābar, Ḥaidar, and Gulbadan have been translated into English, and those of T̤ahmasp have been translated into German; but unfortunately Jahāngīr’s have never been fully translated,2 though there are extracts in Elliot & Dowson’s History, and Major Price many years ago gave us from an imperfect manuscript a garbled account of a few years of his Memoirs. Yet in reality Jahāngīr’s Memoirs are not inferior in interest to those of Bābar. Indeed, we may go further and say there is twice as much matter in them as in Bābar’s Memoirs, and that they are by far the most entertaining of the two works. Not that Jahāngīr was by any means as remarkable a man as his great-grandfather. He was a most faulty human being, and his own account of himself often excites our disgust and contempt. But he had the sense not to confine his narrative to an account of himself, and he has given us a picture of his father, the great Akbar, which is a bigger ‘plum’ than anything in Bābar’s Memoirs. But his account of himself has also its charm, for it reveals the real man, and so he lives for us in his Memoirs just as James VI—to whom, and to the Emperor Claudius, he bears a strange and even ludicrous resemblance—lives in the ‘Fortunes of Nigel’ or Claudius in Suetonius and Tacitus. Jahāngīr was indeed a strange mixture. The man who could stand by and see men flayed alive, and who, as he himself tells us, put one man to death and had two others hamstrung because they showed themselves inopportunely and frightened away his game, could yet be a lover of justice and could spend his Thursday evenings in holding high converse. He could quote Fīrdūsi’s verse against cruelty to animals—