from that day to this, have enjoyed the patronage of the fair throughout the world. In the days of Bernier these shawls were comparatively little known in Europe; yet his account of them, though highly accurate as far as it goes, is brief and rather unsatisfactory.
During the three or four months which he spent in this beautiful country he made several excursions to the surrounding mountains, where, amid the wildest and most majestic scenery, he beheld with wonder, he tells us, the natural succession of generation and decay. At the bottom of many precipitous abysses, where man's foot had never descended, he saw hundreds of enormous trunks, hurled down by time, and heaped upon each other in decay; while at their foot, or between their crumbling branches, young ones were shooting up and flourishing. Some of the trees were scorched and burnt, either blasted by the thunderbolt, or, according to the traditions of the peasantry, set on fire in the heat of summer by rubbing against each other, when agitated by fierce burning winds.
The court, having visited Cashmere from motives of pleasure, were determined to taste every species of it which the country could supply; the wild and sublime, which must be sought with toil and difficulty, as well as those more ordinary ones which lay strewed like flowers upon the earth. The emperor accordingly, or at least his harem, ascended the lower range of hills, to enjoy the prospect of abyss and precipice, impending woods, dusky and horrible, and streams rushing forth from their dark wombs, and leaping with thundering and impetuous fury over cliffs of prodigious elevation. One of these small cataracts appeared to Bernier the most perfect thing of the kind in the world; and Jehangheer, who passed many years in Cashmere, had caused a neighbouring rock, from which it could be contemplated to most advantage, to be levelled, in order to behold
