Nizam, cut off his supplies, and reduced him to sore distress. In this extremity Nizam-ul-mulk engaged to procure from the Padishah a cession of the chout for Malwa and Guzerat to the Peishwa. The Nizam then returned to Delhi, and Baji Rao took possession of Malwa. At this crisis political affairs were brought to a standstill by a sudden and unexpected blow from the side of Persia, which shook the Moghul empire to its foundations.

The modern history of Persia begins with the year 1500, when it was formed into an independent kingdom by a dynasty of Shíah fanatics, known as the Súfi Shahs. The rise of the Súfi empire preceded that of the Moghul empire of Hindustan by a quarter of a century, and its downfall preceded that of the Moghul empire about the same period.

The rule of the Shahs of Persia differed little from that of the Moghul sovereigns of Hindustan. There were no fratricidal wars at the death of a Shah, but the princes were treated with greater cruelty during the lifetime of their father, often kept in state prisons, and blinded or strangled to prevent rebellion. On the death of a Shah a son or a grandson was taken out of a prison and placed upon the throne; and all his brothers, and all other possible rivals, were butchered wholesale. Each Shah in succession seemed to be more weak, more cruel, and more depraved than his predecessor; and it is difficult to understand how the empire could have been kept together, threatened as it was by the Turks on the west, the Russians on the north, and Afghans and Uzebegs to the eastward.

The dynasty was at last overthrown by an invasion of Afghans. About 1710 the Afghans of Kandahar and Herát threw off the Persian yoke, and established their independence under a chieftain of their own race. In 1722 the Afghans marched to Ispahan, and besieged the city until it was starved into unconditional surrender. Shah Husain, the last of the Súfí dynasty, abdicated his throne in favor of Mahmud, the Afghan conqueror; and for a period of eight years, from 1722 to 1730, the people of Persia were subjected to the indescribable atrocities and outrages of Afghan rule.

was joined by a freebooting chieftain named Nadir Kuli, or Nadir the slave. This man was a born general, endowed with an instinct for creating armies and founding empires. He waged such successful wars against the Afghans that, by the year 1730, he had driven them out of Persia and placed Shah Tahmasp on the throne of Ispahan.

But Nadir Kuli Khan, as he was now called, was only making a stepping-stone of Shah Tahmasp. He went off to Khorasan to complete the subjugation of the Afghans. Meanwhile Shah Tahmasp engaged in war against the Turks, met with some disasters, and concluded a peace by yielding up his right to Armenia, Erivan, and Georgia, which had long been in the possession of Persia. Nadir Kuli Khan affected the utmost indignation at this ignominious peace. He returned to Ispahan, threw Shah Tahmasp into confinement, and placed the Shah's infant son upon the throne. He then carried on a war with Turkey until she was compelled to restore the disputed provinces; and Russia was also induced to restore certain territories bordering on the Caspian which had been seized by Peter the Great. Nadir Kuli Khan was thus all-powerful in Persia. In 1736 the infant sovereign died, and Nadir the slave assumed the full sovereignty under the title of Nadir Shah, or Nadir the king.

In 1737 Nadir Shah was engaged in besieging Kandahar, when he sent two successive embassies to the Great Moghul at Delhi. The Moghul court took no notice of these embassies; it did not even dismiss them and permit them to return to their master. Probably the haughty Moghul was prepared to dispute the title of Nadir Shah to the throne of Persia, and to treat him as an upstart and usurper. The result was that Nadir Shah captured Kandahar and Kábul, and then prepared to march an army to Delhi via Peshawar and Lahore.

Khan and Nizam-ul-mulk had been for some time in secret correspondence with Nadir Shah, and had invited him to invade Hindustan.

Nadir Shah was certainly familiar with the progress of affairs in India. He charged Muhammad Shah with having failed to collect the Jezya from the unbelieving Hindus, and with having paid a fourth of his revenue to the idolatrous Mahrattas.

Nadir Shah reached Peshawar without difficulty. The Moghul court had been accustomed to pay a yearly subsidy to the hill tribes for the defence of the frontier passes; but for some years previously the money had been appropriated by the corrupt and unscrupulous minister. Consequently the garrisons had been withdrawn, and the disbanded troops not only left the passes open to Nadir Shah, but eagerly joined his army in the hope of sharing in the spoils of Hindustan. The Persian invader met with little or no resistance on his way through the Punjab. The Moghul Viceroy of the province was in communication with Nizam-ul-mulk; and he deemed it more to his interest to permit Nadir Shah to continue his march, than to sacrifice his troops and himself in vain efforts to repel the invasion.

At last the Moghul court was awakened from its lethargy. A large army marched from Delhi to Kurnal, about sixty-five miles to the northward, under the joint command of Nizam-ul-mulk and Khandauran, and accompanied by Muhammad Shah. Shortly afterwards the army of Nadir Shah approached Kurnal, and encamped in the neighborhood.

At this crisis Saadut Ali Khan arrived at Delhi with reinforcements, and proposed giving the enemy battle. But the old rivalries were still at work. Saadut Ali Khan and Khan-dauran went out to engage the enemy, but Nizam-ul-mulk stood aloof and refused to join in the fighting. The Moghul army was utterly defeated; Saadut Ali Khan was taken prisoner, and Khan-dauran received a mortal wound.

Muhammad Shah was now at the mercy of Nadir Shah. Nizam-ul-mulk was sent to offer terms to the conqueror; he is said to have agreed to pay two crores of rupees, or two millions sterling, provided Nadir Shah returned to Persia without advancing on Delhi. The terms were accepted,

and Nizam-ul-mulk returned to the camp of the Padishah with the joyful news, and was rewarded with the coveted rank of Amír of Amírs, or chief of all the Amírs.

Saádut Ali Khan was stung with jealousy at the honor conferred on his rival. He told Nadir Shah that two crores were only a flea-bite in comparison with the treasures of Delhi; and he persuaded the invader to pursue his march to the Moghul capital, by promising to collect a subsidy of twenty crores. The offer was accepted, and Saádut Ali Khan hastened back to Delhi.

Nadir Shah set out on his march to Delhi with the expectation of receiving a subsidy of twenty millions sterling. He ordered Muhammad Shah to go on before him and prepare the city and palace for his reception. He received a visit from Saádut Ali Khan in the suburbs, but treated him with harshness, and asked why he had not begun to collect the subsidy. Saádut saw that his ruin was at hand. He left the presence of Nadir Shah in abject terror, swallowed a dose of poison, and passed away from the scene.

All

Next day Nadir Shah entered the city of Delhi with twenty thousand men. houses and shops were closed; not a soul appeared in the streets. Amidst this portentous gloom, Nadir Shah posted his troops in various quarters of the city, and proceeded to the palace, where he was duly entertained by Muhammad Shah.

The soldiers of Nadir Shah were known as the Persian army, but they chiefly consisted of Tartars, Afghans, and Uzbegs; and were naturally regarded with disgust and hatred by the proud Moghuls. Nadir Shah promulgated stringent orders that none of the inhabitants of Delhi should be injured; indeed all that he wanted was to collect the subsidy as thoroughly and rapidly as possible, and this could be best achieved by abstaining from all alarms. But the people of Delhi were driven by terror and shame into acts of madness. On the day after the entry of Nadir Shah, being the 10th of March, 1739, a turmoil arose in the city. Many of the strangers were cut down and slaughtered. A rumor spread through the streets and bazars that Nadir Shah had been slain within the palace. The mob arose in overwhelming force and began to massacre the foreign soldiery, in the same way that they had

massacred the Mahrattas some twenty years before. The approach of night increased the uproar. The troops of Nadir Shah retreated to their quarters in the caravanserais and houses of the grandees, and stood under arms throughout the night, whilst all stragglers were butchered by the infuriated multitude.

At early morning Nadir Shah left the palace with a strong force, and began riding through the streets of Delhi. The sight of the dead bodies of his troops aroused his terrible wrath. At the same moment he was assailed with stones, arrows, and firearms, from the houses, and one of his chiefs was slain by his side. He determined on a deed of vengeance, which has no parallel in modern history. He ordered an indiscriminate massacre of the inhabitants without regard to age or sex. No city taken by storm could have presented greater horrors. The Persian army, maddened by the sight of their bleeding comrades, spread over the city like demons, breaking open shops, houses, and palaces, slaughtering, plundering, burning, destroying, and committing every kind of outrage with an unbridled fury which knew not how to pity nor how to spare.

The sack and carnage of Delhi lasted from eight o'clock in the morning until three o'clock in the afternoon. The streets were filled with the shouts of the brutal soldiery and the shrieks of their helpless victims. The atmosphere was reeking with the blood and butchery of thousands of human beings. Houses were set on fire, and numbers perished in the flames. Husbands killed their wives and then murdered themselves. Women threw themselves into wells. Children were slaughtered without mercy, and infants were cut to pieces at their mothers' breasts.

All this while Nadir Shah sat in a little mosque in the principal street, which is still pointed out to modern travellers. His presence, in his milder moods, was sufficient to strike beholders with awe. Six feet high, with swarthy countenance, large eyes, and a voice of thunder, his commanding aspect compelled all men to bend before him. But now, as he sat in the mosque, his features were lighted up by a stern ferocity, as if he exulted in the greatness of his revenge. Nizam-ul-mulk, stung by remorse, threw himself at the feet of the conqueror, and prayed for mercy towards the innocent inhabitants; but he

was received with torrents of abuse that must have added to his terrors. Muhammad Shah followed his example, and begged that his subjects might be spared from further slaughter. At last the bloodthirsty warrior began to relent; he sent out orders that the butchery should end, and he was promptly and implicitly obeyed. But the sun set upon a scene of horror and devastation which has rarely been equalled in the annals of Tartar revenge.

Next morning the survivors were ordered under terrible penalties to dispose of the dead. The corpses of Hindus and Muhammadans were thrown promiscuously together. Many were buried in vast pits; many were cast on piles of timber taken from the falling houses, and burnt in huge holocausts. The number of slain can never be known. According to one wild estimate, more than a hundred thousand souls perished in the massacre; bat if the number is reduced to one-fifth or one-tenth, it is sufficient to strike men with terror until the end of time.

When the slaughter was over and the murdered heaps had been cleared away, the work of plunder and exaction was carried out with relentless barbarity. The peacock throne and all the jewels of the imperial palace became the spoil of the conqueror; so did the best of the cannon and warlike stores, and the choicest of the elephants, horses, and camels. Contributions were levied from every grandee, and from every dwelling-house in the capital; and any show of reluctance or attempt at concealment was met by threats and tortures. Many who were unable to meet the demand committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of their tormentors. A body of Persian horse was sent to Oude, and confiscated the treasures of Saadut Ali Khan to the value of one or two millions sterling. A like sum was demanded of Nizam-ul-mulk, and a large amount seems to have been obtained; but the treasury of the Dekhan was out of the reach of Nadir Shah; and any force despatched in that direction might have been cut off in the passes of the Vindhya mountains, or exposed to the assaults of the Mahrattas. An attempt was made to secure a subsidy from Bengal; but the treasury of Murshedabad was too remote from Delhi; and not even the avarice of Nadir Shah would induce him to send an army into the defiles of Bihar.

The total value of the gold, silver, jewels, weapons, stuffs, stores, and money carried off by Nadir Shah has been variously estimated from eight to eighty millions; but all such conjectures are the sport of the imagination. Nothing is known beyond the fact that the invader carried off vast and untold treasures; that he gave three months' pay to every soldier in his army, and remitted a year's taxation throughout the whole Persian empire.

Nadir Shah demanded the niece of Muhammad Shah in marriage for his second son. He also demanded the cession to Persia of all territories to the westward of the Indus which had previously belonged to the Moghul. Indeed, he might have made any demand he thought proper, for Muhammad Shah was far too prostrate to attempt any refusal. The marriage of his son to the Moghul princess was solemnized with some show of rejoicing; and the cession of territory was embodied in a formal grant, which was couched in terms of abject submission to the will of the conqueror.

Nadir Shah reinstated the fallen Moghul in the possession of his throne and empire. He exhorted every vassal and feudatory to be loyal in their devotion to Muhammad Shah; and he threatened to wreak his vengeance on any that should attempt to rebel. He then returned to Persia after a stay of two months in Hindustan.

Nadir Shah never reappeared in India. He lived nine years longer, during which he was engaged in wars with the Turks, or in putting down rebellions in his own territories. Unfortunately for him, he interfered with the national religion of Persia. He sought to put an end to the antagonism between Shiahs and Sunnís by declaring the Sunní faith to be the one state religion of the empire. He thus raised a storm of fanaticism against his rule, which no force could allay. In 1747, at the age of sixty, he was cut off by assassins, after a troubled reign of eleven years. The invasion of Nadir Shah inflicted a mortal blow on the Moghul empire. Muhammad Shah was re-seated on the throne of his fathers, but his sovereignty was little better than a name. The Viceroys of the provinces had become independent princes. The death of a Subahdar or Nawab was followed by fratricidal wars like those which attended the demise of a Padishah; and not unfrequently by the

elevation of a usurper with no other authority than that derived from the sword. The Mahrattas were no longer to be quieted by payments from the imperial treasury, for the treasury had been emptied by Nadir Shah; and the Mahratta leaders led their hosts of horsemen to the remotest quarters of India, plundering and devastating the two Carnatics in the southern Peninsula, and at the same time spreading like destroying locusts over the fertile plains of Bengal.

Baji Rao died in 1740, and was succeeded in the post of Peishwa by his son Balaji Rao. Maharaja Sahu died in 1748, the year after the assassination of Nadir Shah, and was succeeded on the throne of Satara by a nominal sovereign named Raja Ram. At the same time a noiseless revolution was carried out, under which the real sovereignty was transferred from the Maharaja to the Peishwa. Raja Ram reigned as a state pageant in the fortress or prison at Satara; whilst Balaji Rao removed the Mahratta court to Poona, and reigned at the old capital of Sivaji as the independent sovereign of the Mahratta empire, but under the old name of Peishwa or minister.

Muhammad Shah died in 1748, the same year that saw the death of Maharaja Sahu. At this moment a new enemy appeared in Hindustan to contest with the Mahrattas for supremacy. The assassination of Nadir Shah in the previous year had delivered the Afghans from the Persian yoke. Another Asiatic conqueror rose to the front under the name of Ahmad Shah Abdali. He extended the independent empire of the Afghans over the greater part of Central Asia, including the Punjab and Kashmír. He invaded Hindustan for the purpose of re-establishing the old Afghan supremacy in India. The consequence was that the successors of Muhammad Shah were mere pageants in the hands of rival ministers, who in their turn were alternately under the influence of Mahrattas and Afghans.

At this turning-point in the downward career of the once Great Moghul, the history of India underwent an entire revolution. The Moghul empire was broken up never to be restored. The foundations of a new empire were laid by English settlers, which was destined to extend its paramount influence over the whole of India from sea to sea. The centre of political

interest is thus transferred from the old Moghul capital of Delhi to the English settlements of Madras and Calcutta. The Hindu nationalities of India, after centuries of repression, were to be educated by British administrators in a knowledge of that civilization, which has regenerated the western world and established the reign of order and of law. In this manner the people of India are being trained and disciplined by British rule for a new career of national life, which can only be revealed in the unknown world of the future.

THE LANG COORTIN'.

[Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (born about 1833), humorist, who took his degree in 1854 from Christ Church, Oxford, where he has since become senior student and tutor, giving lectures in mathematics. In 1865 he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a humorous fairy story on the common surroundings of child-life, that is still eagerly read wherever the English language is spoken. This was succeeded, in 1869, by a collection of humorous poems and parodies called Phantasmagoria, and, in 1872, by Through the Looking-Glass, a continuation of Alice and equally popular. The Hunting of the Snark, the longest of his humorous poems, was published in 1876, and was followed by two further collections: Doublets (1879), and Rhyme and Reason! (1883). Mr. Dodgson is also the author of several mathematical text-books, of which Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879) is the most amusing, with the exception of A Tangled Tale (1886), his latest production of mingled humor and Ecience.]

The ladye she stood at her lattice high,
Wi' her doggie at her feet:
Through the lattice she can spy
The passers in the street.

"There's one that standeth at the door,

And tirleth at the pin:

Now speak and say, my popinjay,
If I sall let him in."

Then up and spake the popinjay, That flew abune her head:

"Gae let him in that tirls the pin: He cometh thee to wed."

O, when he can' the parlor in,
A woeful man was he!

"And dinna ye ken your lover agen, Sae well that loveth thee?"

"And how wad I ken ye loved me, sir,
That have been sae lang away?
And how wad I ken ye loved me, sir?
Ye never telled me sae."

Said, "Ladye, dear," and the salt, salt tear
Cam' rinnin' doon his cheek,

I have sent thee tokens of my love
This many and many a week.

"O, didna ye get the rings, Ladye,
The rings o' the gowd sae fine?
I wot that I have sent to thee
Fourscore, fourscore and nine."

"They cam' to me," said that fair ladye.
"Wow, they were flimsie things!
Said, "That chain o' gowd, my doggie to
howd,

It is made o' thae self-same rings."

"And didna ye get the locks, the locks,

The locks o' my ain black hair Whilk I sent by post, whilk I sent by box, Whilk I sent by the carrier?"

"They cam' to me," said that fair ladye; "And I prithee send nae mair!"

Said, "That cushion sae red, for my doggie's head,

It is stuffed wi' thae locks o' hair."

"And didna ye get the letter, Ladye, Tied wi' a silken string,

Whilk I sent to thee frae the far countrie, A message of love to bring?"

"It cam' to me frae the far countrie,

Wi' its silken string and a';

But it wasna prepaid," said that high-born maid,

"Sae I gar'd them tak' it awa'."

"O, ever alack that ye sent it back, It was written sae clerkly and well! Now the message it brought, and the boon that it sought,

I must even say it mysel'."

Then up and spake the popinjay,
Sae wisely counselled he:
"Now say it in the proper way:
Gae doon upon thy knee!'

The lover he turned baith red and pale,
Went doon upon his knee: