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.
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