The pictures of the Emperor and Empress here presented were painted on ivory by the Court portrait-painter twenty years ago, and are beautiful specimens of native art, and very correct likenesses of them both.
We will now turn from these royal persons to their home, and some of their splendid surroundings; and, first of all, let us look at their historical and beautiful Dewan Khass. There was something remarkably significant in the fact that the magnificent and famous Audience Hall of the Moguls should sink to ruin with the dynasty which had so long adorned it. For two hundred and fifty years they had shed luster upon each other; but, when we remember the crimes which had so long cried to Heaven for vengeance from the polished floor of this marble hall, it did seem fitting that the Most High, who ruleth in the kingdoms of men, in the hour when their judgment came should, with the same blow, strike down both the Mogul line and their magnificent memorial. When their cup of iniquity was full, and their hands were red with Christian blood, then came the day of vengeance.
It was my lot to be a witness of the wondrous ruin—to behold this imperial head of Oriental Mohammedanism, this “Light of the Faith,” as he was designated, sinking into utter ruin and darkness;
“Falling, like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.”
When I reached the Mogul capital of Hindustan, in the autumn of 1856, the Dewan Khass was still the center of state and pageantry, and its imperial master living in Oriental style on his salary of eighteen lakhs of rupees—$900,000 gold—per annum. Within one year from that day I was again in the Dewan Khass, where he used to sit in his gorgeous array, to witness his trial, and that of his princes and nobles, before a military commission of British officers, by whom he was condemned to be banished as a felon to a foreign shore for the remnant of his miserable life, there to subsist on a convict's allowance; and within a few weeks after, when I again visited the once magnificent Dewan Khass, I found it despoiled of its glory, its marble halls and columns whitewashed,
