as I entered this apartment, sat Aurangzeb when he ordered the assassination of his brothers Dara and Murad, and the imprisonment and destruction by slow poison of his son Muhammad, who had so often fought bravely by his side in battle.  Here also, but a few months before, sat the great Shah Jahan to receive the insolent commands of this same grandson Muhammad when flushed with victory, and to offer him the throne, merely to disappoint the hopes of the youth’s father, Aurangzeb.  Here stood in chains the graceful Sulaiman, to receive his sentence of death by slow poison with his poor young brother Sipihr Shikoh, who had shared all his father’s toils and dangers, and witnessed his brutal murder.[26] Here sat Muhammad Shah, bandying compliments with his ferocious conqueror, Nadir Shah, who had destroyed his armies, plundered his treasury, stripped his throne, and ordered the murder of a hundred thousand of the helpless inhabitants of his capital, men, women, and children, in a general massacre.  The bodies of these people lay in the streets tainting the air, while the two sovereigns sat here sipping their coffee, and swearing to the most deliberate lies in the name of their God, Prophet, and Koran;—­all are now dust; that of the oppressor undistinguishable from that of the oppressed.[27]

Within this apartment and over the side arches at one end is inscribed in black letters the celebrated couplet, ’If there be a paradise on the face of the earth, it is this—­it is this—­it is this.[28] Anything more unlike paradise than this place now is can hardly be conceived.  Here are crowded together twelve hundred kings and queens (for all the descendants of the Emperors assume the title of Salatin, the plural of Sultan) literally eating each other up.[29]

Government, from motives of benevolence, has here attempted to apportion out the pension they assign to the Emperor, to the different members of his great family circle who are to be subsisted upon it, instead of leaving it to his own discretion.  This has perhaps tended to prevent the family from throwing off its useless members to mix with the common herd, and to make the population press against the means of subsistence within these walls.  Kings and queens of the house of Timur are to be found lying about in scores, like broods of vermin, without food to eat or clothes to cover their nakedness.  It has been proposed by some to establish colleges for them in the palace to fit them by education for high offices under our Government.  Were this done, this pensioned family, which never can possibly feel well affected towards our Government or any Government but their own, would alone send out men enough to fill all the civil offices open to the natives of the country, to the exclusion of the members of the humbler but better affected families of Muhammadans and Hindoos.  If they obtained the offices they would be educated for, the evil to Government and to society would be