Some horrible stories are preserved of the ruthless administration of poison by the Mohammedan sovereigns in India. Thus Tavernier, the French traveller in the seventeenth century, says of the great state prison of Gwalior that the emperor Aurungzeb was so sensitive lest he should be stigmatised as a cruel prince he never suffered any great subject to survive long in prison; at the end of the ninth or tenth day the captive was removed by poison. No doubt Hyder Ali poisoned a number of his English prisoners, and the inhuman murder of General Mathews by Tippoo Sing is told by James Bristowe, who suffered a long captivity under the same merciless monarch. The general was poisoned under the most abominable circumstances. He was starving himself to death rather than partake of the food issued to him, which he had discovered contained poison. He studiously abstained from food for several days until at length, tortured by overmastering hunger, he devoured a plate of poisoned victuals and expired a few hours later in violent convulsions. Another officer, Captain Romley, who saw himself constrained to swallow poison, preferred to commit suicide by some other means. Yet again, Lieutenant Fraser had poison forcibly poured down his throat. The traditions of the native states as to poisoning were preserved in at least one till a late date in the last century. In Baroda, a Rajput ruler, the Gaekwar Mulhar Rao, was the centre of a nest of criminal intrigue rivalling anything in the past, as great a miscreant as any one in his depraved court and more guilty than any of his subjects in the use of his despotic power. Crime was the very breath of his princely house; its members hated one another with bitter animosity; assassination, largely by secret poisoning, was the chief avenue to the throne, but all kinds of flagitious means were employed to secure succession; charges backed by elaborate perjury were as often used to upset a rival aspirant, as powdered arsenic or diamond dust to remove him permanently to another sphere.