of great importance at Goa.  He died at Cochin on his way back, and is supposed to have been poisoned by the Portuguese, who were extremely jealous of his influence at court.  He left a son by a native, called Muhammad Sharif, who was employed as an architect on a salary of five hundred rupees a month, and who became, as I conclude from his name, a Musalman.  Shah Jahan had commenced his own tomb on the opposite side of the Jumna; and both were to have been united by a bridge.[18] The death of Austin de Bordeaux, and the wars between his [scil. Shah Jahan’s] sons that followed prevented the completion of these magnificent works.[19]

We were encamped upon a fine green sward outside the entrance to the south, in a kind of large court, enclosed by a high cloistered wall, in which all our attendants and followers found shelter.  Colonel and Mrs. King, and some other gentlemen, were encamped in the same place, and for the same purpose; and we had a very agreeable party.  The band of our friend Major Godby’s regiment played sometimes in the evening upon the terrace of the Taj; but, of all the complicated music ever heard upon earth, that of a flute blown gently in the vault below, where the remains of the Emperor and his consort repose, as the sound rises to the dome amidst a hundred arched alcoves around, and descends in heavenly reverberations upon those who sit or recline upon the cenotaphs above the vault, is, perhaps, the finest to an inartificial car.  We feel as if it were from heaven, and breathed by angels; it is to the ear what the building itself is to the eye; but, unhappily, it cannot, like the building, live in our recollections.  All that we can, in after life, remember is that it was heavenly, and produced heavenly emotions.

We went all over the palace in the fort, a very magnificent building constructed by Shah Jahan within fortifications raised by his grandfather Akbar.[20]

The fretwork and mosaic upon the marble pillars and panels are equal to those of the Taj; or, if possible, superior; nor is the design or execution in any respect inferior, and yet a European feels that he could get a house much more commodious, and more to his taste, for a much less sum than must have been expended upon it.  The Marquis of Hastings, when Governor-General of India, broke up one of the most beautiful marble baths of this palace to send home to George IV of England, then Prince Regent, and the rest of the marble of the suite of apartments from which it had been taken, with all its exquisite fretwork and mosaic, was afterwards sold by auction, on account of our Government, by order of the then Governor-General, Lord W. Bentinck.  Had these things fetched the price expected, it is probable that the whole of the palace, and even the Taj itself, would have been pulled down, and sold in the same manner.[21]