Regarding the actual events of Shâhjahân's reign, there is very little to say. The Dekkan--in which we can now include the whole southward country down to Cape Cormorin, the hitherto unsurveyed, unrecorded triangle forming the apex of India having, chiefly by the nibbling of foreigners along the entire seaboard, by this time come into the equation--was as ever unsettled. It had, even in Akbar's time, been nothing more than a fief of the Crown, and though under his system it would doubtless have become in time an integral part of the empire, it was gradually making once more for independence. So, naturally, there was trouble in the Dekkan. The Râjputs, however, seem to have been fairly quiescent, and the chief disturbances of Shâhjahân's time were the constant quarrels of his four sons, Dâra, Shujah, Aurungzebe, and Morâd. These, with four daughters, Pâdshâh or Jahanâra Begum, Roshanrâi Begum, and two others, were undoubtedly the children of one wife; nor is there mention of others, so if it be true that Mumtâz Mahal, to whose memory the Tâj was built, died in giving birth to a thirteenth child, many of her family must have died, or been done away with in infancy; legend says the latter, Shâhjahân being three parts Râjput. It was, curiously enough, Shâhjahân's absolute adoration for his eldest daughter, Pâdshâh or Jahanâra Begum, which was the cause of England's first hold on Bengal. She was badly burnt in attempting to save a favourite companion, and an English doctor, Gabriel Boughton, hastily summoned from Surat, asked and received as his fee, the right for Great Britain to trade in Bengal. To return to the sons. Dâra, the eldest, is drawn by Bernier in fairly pleasing colours. Frank and impetuous, liberal in his opinions, he made enemies with one hand while he made friends with the other, while his open profession of the tenets held by his grandfather Akbar, and the writing of a book to reconcile Hindu and Mahomedan doctrines, alienated the orthodox from his cause. Shujah, by his father's estimate, was a mere drunkard; Morâd, the youngest, a sensualist. There remains Aurungzebe. He was an absolute contrast to Dâra. A small man, with a big brain and absolutely no heart. A man of creeds and caution, of faith and faithlessness. He had what historians call an "early turn for devotion." In a thousand ways--and those the least estimable--he reminds one of Cromwell; Cromwell without his magnificent sincerity of purpose. The history of the mutual misunderstandings and divisions and coalitions of these princes is indeed a weary one. Only Dâra comes out of it with comparatively clean hands. Indeed, in the last act of the drama of Shâhjahân's actual reign of thirty years our sympathies go entirely with Dâra, as he struggles to maintain his own future position, and still uphold that of the sick king.