FOOTNOTES:
[11] The palace constructed, in the early ages of the world, by the giant-king Sheddad, as a rival to the heavenly paradise, and supposed still to exist, though invisible to mortal eyes, in the recesses of the Desert—See Lane's Thousand and One Nights, vol, ii. p. 342.
[12] The Persian princes imagine these children to be collected from all parts of the United Kingdom, for the purpose of this procession!
[13] The Khan never gives dates; but on investigation we find that this must have been on the 11th of June 1841; as among the list of visitors on that day occur the names of Kurreen Khan, Mohabet Khan, and, singularly enough, the Parsee poet, Manackjee Cursetjee, who will be well remembered as a lion of the London drawing-rooms during that season.
[14] The polite dialect of Hindustani, which differs considerably from that in use among the lower orders. The phrase is derived from Oorda, the court, or camp, of the sovereign—whence our word horde.
[15] "One hundred and fifty-three of the students," he adds, "were fixed upon for commissions, who were to be sent out to India;" but the Khan must have been strangely misinformed here, as the number actually selected was only thirty-one.
[16] This must have been the Trafalgar of 120 guns, which was launched June 21, 1841; but the Khan is mistaken in supposing that the Queen personally performed the ceremony of christening the ship, since that duty devolved on Lady Bridport, the niece of Nelson, who used on the occasion a bottle of wine which had been on board the Victory when Nelson fell.
[17] This must be a slip of the pen for Selim, or perhaps for Soliman Ibn Selim, (Soliman the Magnificent.)
[18] "At this epoch," adds the Khan in a note, "reigned the great Harūn-al-Rashid, the khalif and supreme head of Islam; and Charles the Great was Emperor of the Franks."
[19] The Mirza even went so far as to write during his stay in England a treatise, entitled "Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women," which was translated by Captain Richardson, and published first in the Asiatic Annual Register for 1801, and again as an Appendix to the Mirza's Travels. It is a very curious pamphlet, and well worth perusal.
[20] Great efforts have of late been made, among the more enlightened Hindus, to get rid of this prejudice. Baboo Motee Loll Seal, a wealthy native of Calcutta, offered 20,000 rupees, a year or two since, to the first Hindu who would marry a widow, and we believe the prize has been since claimed:—and in the Asiatic Journal (vol. xxxviii. p. 370,) we find the announcement of the establishment, in 1842, of a "Hindu widow re-marrying club" at Calcutta!