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chose. The Moghul emperors displayed a laudable appreciation of the fine arts, which they employed with lavish hands in the decoration of their palaces. A large number of exquisite miniatures, or paintings on paper designed to illustrate manuscripts or to form royal portrait-albums, have come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The technique and detail are admirable, and the colouring and lights often astonishingly skilful. They include portraits of the emperors, princes, and chief nobles which display unusual power in the delineation of individual countenances, and there are landscapes which are happily conceived and brilliantly executed. There is no doubt that the Jesuit missions at Agra and other cities of Hindustan brought Western ideas to bear upon the development of Indian painting. Jahangir, who was, by his own account, "very fond of pictures and an excellent judge of them," is recorded to have had a picture of the Madonna behind a curtain, and this picture is represented in a contemporary painting which has fortunately been preserved. Tavernier saw on a gate outside Agra a representation of Jahangir's tomb "carved with a great black pall with many torches of white wax, and two Jesuit Fathers at the end," and adds that Shah Jahan allowed this to remain because "his father and himself had learnt from the Jesuits some principles of mathematics and astrology." The Augustinian Manrique, who came to inspect the Jesuit missions in the time of Shah Jahan, found, as we have seen, the prime minister, Asaf Khan, at Lahore in a