The biography of Man Singh would afford a remarkable picture of human patience, fortitude, and constancy, never surpassed in any age or country. But in this school of adversity he also took lessons of cruelty: he learned therein to master or rather disguise his passions; and though he showed not the ferocity of the tiger, he acquired [712] the still more dangerous attribute of that animal—its cunning. At that very time, not long after he had emerged from his seclusion, while his features were modelled into an expression of complaisant self-content, indicative of a disdain of human greatness, he was weaving his web of destruction for numberless victims who were basking in the sunshine of his favour. The fate of one of them has been already related.[4.27.5] =Descent of the Rāthors.=—The Rathor, like many other dynasties not confined to the East, claims celestial descent. Of their Bhat, we may say what Gibbon does of the Belgic genealogist who traced the illustrious house of Este from Romulus, that “he riots in all the lust of fiction, and spins from his own bowels a lineage of some thousand years.” We are certain that there were sovereigns of Kanauj in the fifth century, and it is very probable that they ruled there prior to the era of Christianity. But this is accounted nothing by these lovers of antiquity, who never stop short of Swayambhuva,[4.27.6] and the ark, in which the antediluvian records of the Rathors may have been preserved with those of the De Courcys. But we will not revert to those “happy times, when a genealogical tree would strike its root into any soil, and the luxuriant plant could flourish and fructify without a seed of truth.” Then the ambition of the Rathor for a solar pedigree could be gratified without difficulty. But it requires neither Bhat nor bard to illustrate its nobility: a series of splendid deeds which time cannot obliterate has emblazoned the Rathor name on the historical tablet. Where all these races have gained a place in the temple of fame, it is almost invidious to select; but truth compels me to place the Rathor with the Chauhan, on the very pinnacle. The names of Chonda and Jodha are sufficient to connect Siahji, the founder, a scion of Kanauj, with his descendant, Raja Man:[4.27.7] the rest Were long to tell; how many battles fought; How many kings destroyed, and kingdoms won.