The fortunes of the mighty house of Sindiah were founded by Ranajee, who was a menial servant early in the last century in the household of the Peshwah, Bajee Rao; and is said to have first attracted his master's notice by the care with which he was found clasping to his breast, during his sleep, the slippers which had been left in his charge. He subsequently distinguished himself under the Peshwah in the famous campaigns of 1737-8 against the Mogul emperor, Mohammed Shah: and on the cession of Malwa to the Mahrattas in 1743, he received the government of that province as a _jaghir_ or fief, which he transmitted at his death to his son Mahdajee. The life of this daring and politic chief would be almost identical with the history, during the same period, of Central and Upper India, in which he attained such a degree of authority as had not been held by any prince since Aurungzeeb; but we can here only briefly trace his career through the labyrinth of war and negotiation. In the disastrous defeat of Paniput, (1761,) where the united forces of the Mahratta confederacy were almost annihilated by the Affghans under Ahmed Shah Doorauni, he received a wound which rendered him lame for life; but he soon resumed his designs on Hindostan, and in 1771 became master for a time of Delhi and the person of the Mogul emperor, Shah Alim. In the war with the English which followed, he conciliated the esteem of the cabinet of Calcutta, by his generosity to the troops who submitted at the disgraceful convention of Worgaom, in January 1779: and at the peace of Salbye, in 1782, his independence was expressly recognised by the British government, with which he treated as mediator and plenipotentiary for the Peshwah and the whole Mahratta nation. He had now, by the aid of a Piedmontese soldier of fortune, named De Boigne, succeeded in organizing a disciplined force of infantry and artillery, directed principally by European officers, with which no native power was able to cope; and in 1785, after defeating Gholam-Khadir the Rohilla, once more possessed himself of Delhi and its titular sovereign, who became his pensioner and prisoner, while Sindiah exercised in his name supreme sway from the Ganges to the Gulf of Camboy, and from Candeish to the Sutlej. In 1790 he entered the Dekkan, and was with difficulty prevented by Nana Furnavees, the able minister of the youthful Peshwah, Madhoo Rao, from usurping the guardianship of that prince, which would have given him the same ascendancy in the Dekkan as he already held in Hindostan. But though thus at the summit of power and prosperity, he constantly affected the humility befitting the lowly origin of his house; and when at the court of Poonah in 1791, placed himself below the hereditary nobles of the Mahratta empire, with a bundle of slippers in his hand, saying, "This is my place, and my duty, as it was my father's." In the words of Sir John Malcolm, (_Central India_, i. 122,) "he was the nominal slave, but the rigid