After an interval of about five years, the secondvolume of Mr. Alexander Rogers’ translation ofJahāngīr’s Memoirs has been published by the RoyalAsiatic Society. It is a smaller work than the first volume, for itonly extends over six years of the reign, as against the twelve yearsof its predecessor. Even then it does not include the whole of thereign, for that lasted twenty-two years. The two volumes, however,contain all that Jahāngīr wrote or supervised. It will befound, I think, that the present volume is fully as interesting as itspredecessor. The accounts of the Zodiacal coinage (pp. 6 and 7), and ofthe comet, or new star (p. 48), the notice of the Plague in Agra (pp.65–67), and the elaborate description of Kashmīr, under thechronicle of the 15th year, are valuable, and a word should be said forthe pretty story of the King and the Gardener’s daughter (p. 50),and for the allusions to painters and pictures.

If Bābur, who was the founder of the Moghul Empirein India, was the Cæsar of the East, and if the many-sided Akbarwas an epitome of all the great Emperors, including Augustus, Trajan,Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Julian, and Justinian. Jahāngīr wascertainly of the type of the Emperor Claudius, and so bore a closeresemblance to our James I. All three were weak men, and under theinfluence of their favourites, and all three were literary, and atleast two of them were fond of dabbling in theology. All three were intheir wrong places as rulers. Had James I. (and VI. of Scotland) been,as he half wished, the Keeper of the Bodleian, and Jahāngīrbeen head of a Natural History Museum, they would have been better andhappier men. Jahāngīr’s best [vi]points were his love of nature and powers ofobservation, and his desire to do justice. Unfortunately, the last ofthese merits was vitiated by a propensity for excessive and reconditepunishments. Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, hewas addicted to drugs and alcohol, and he shortened his life in thisway. He made no addition to the imperial territories, but, on thecontrary, diminished them by losing Qandahar to the Persians. Butpossibly his peaceful temper, or his laziness, was an advantage, for itsaved much bloodshed. His greatest fault as a king was his subservienceto his wife, Nūr-Jahān, and the consequent quarrel with hisson, Shah Jahan, who was the ablest and best of his male children. Thelast years of his reign were especially melancholy, for he sufferedfrom asthma and other diseases; and he had to endure the ignominy ofbeing for a while a captive to one of his ownservants—Mahābat K͟hān. He died on the borders ofKashmir, when on his way to Lahore, in Octo

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