increased means of promoting their interest and that of their friends; and they detest us all most cordially in consequence.  The peasantry of the Gwalior territory seem to consider their own government as a kind of minotaur, which they would be glad to see destroyed, no matter how or by whom; since it gives no lucrative or honourable employment to any of their members, so as to interest either their pride or their affections; nor throws back among them for purposes of local advantage any of the produce of their land and labour which it exacts.  It is worthy of remark that, though the Dholpur chief is peculiarly the creature of the British Government, and indebted to it for all he has or ever will have, and though he has never had anything, and never can have, or can hope to have, anything from the poor pageant of the house of Timur, who now sits upon the throne of Delhi;[12] yet, on his seal of office he declares himself to be the slave and creature of that imperial ‘warrior for the faith of Islam’.  As he abstains from eating the good fish of the river Chambal to enhance his claim to caste among Hindoos, so he abstains from acknowledging his deep debt of gratitude to the Honourable Company, or the British Government, with a view to give the rust of age to his rank and title.  To acknowledge himself a creature of the British Government were to acknowledge that he was a man of yesterday; to acknowledge himself the slave of the Emperor is to claim for his poor veins ‘the blood of a line of kings’.  The petty chiefs of Bundelkhand, who are in the same manner especially dependent on the British Government, do the same thing.

At Dholpur, there are some noble old mosques and mausoleums built three hundred years ago, in the reign of the Emperor Humayun, by some great officers of his government, whose remains still rest undisturbed among them, though the names of their families have been for many ages forgotten, and no men of their creed now live near to demand for them the respect of the living.  These tombs are all elaborately built and worked out of the fine freestone of the country and the trellis-work upon some of their stone screens is still as beautiful as when first made.  There are Persian and Arabic inscriptions upon all of them, and I found from them that one of the mosques had been built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in A.D. 1634,[13] when he little dreamed that his three sons would here meet to fight the great fight for the throne while he yet sat upon it.[14]

Notes: 

1.  December, 1835.

2.  The author’s remark that in India the roads are ‘nowhere metalled’ must seem hardly credible to a modern traveller, who sees the country intersected by thousands of miles of metalled road.  The Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Lahore, constructed in Lord Dalhousie’s time, alone measures about 1,200 miles.  The development of roads since 1850 ha been enormous, and yet the mileage of good roads would have to be increased tenfold to put India on an equality with the more advanced countries of Europe.