such capacity for the management of State affairs, that her husband seems for years to have resigned the reins of government into her hands, while he was consuming his time over the wine bottle in the company of a favorite French physician.
From this dream of pleasure, the history tells us, Shah Jehan was suddenly awakened by the fatal illness of his beautiful Empress. She died in giving birth to a daughter, who is said to have been heard crying in the womb by herself and her other daughters. She sent for the Emperor, and told him that she believed no mother had ever been known to survive the birth of a child so heard, and that she felt her end was near. “She had,” she said, “only two requests to make: first, that he would not marry again after her death, and have children to contend with hers for his favors and dominions; and, secondly, that he would build for her the tomb with which he had promised to perpetuate her name.” Both her dying requests were granted. Her tomb was commenced immediately. No woman ever pretended to supply her place in the palace, nor had Shah Jehan children by any other.
But Moomtaj might well, in her dying hours, make the request she did, for she could not be ignorant that Shah Jehan had secured the throne to himself, from the other children of his father, by the use of the dagger and the bow-string. And it was not without reason; for before she was many years laid in the Taj her own children, even, contended for the throne; and the magnificent Shah Jehan, realizing that “as he had done so God rewarded him,” died in prison in 1666, a captive in the hands of his son, Aurungzebe, who had already followed the example of his father in hunting down and destroying his brothers and nephews in order to secure the throne undisputed to himself.
But we return to the peaceful Taj. The Empress Moomtaj was a Khadija in her day, a Mohammedan devotee, and a bitter foe of Christianity—such Christianity as she knew. She took care that this animosity should go with her to the grave, and even be inserted on her tomb; and there it is to-day, in the Taj, amid the flowers and inscriptions on her cenotaph—a prohibition and a prayer against
