From these flowers Baber and his army marched into the passes of the high mountains. His narrative goes on: It was at this time that I composed the following verses: There is no violence or injury of fortune that I have not experienced; This broken heart has endured them all. Alas! is there one left that I have not encountered? For about a week we continued pressing down the snow without being able to advance more than two or three miles. I myself assisted in trampling down the snow. Every step we sank up to the middle or the breast, but we still went on, trampling it down. As the strength of the person who went first was generally exhausted after he had advanced a few paces, he stood still, while another took his place. The ten, fifteen, or twenty people who worked in trampling down the snow, next succeeded in dragging on a horse without a rider. Drawing this horse aside, we brought on another, and in this way ten, fifteen, or twenty of us contrived to bring forward the horses of all our number. The rest of the troops, even our best men, advanced along the road that had been beaten for them, hanging their heads. This was no time for plaguing them or employing authority. Every man who possesses spirit or emulation hastens to such works of himself. Continuing to advance by a track which we beat in the snow in this manner, we reached a cave at the foot of the Zirrin pass. That day the storm of wind was dreadful. The snow fell in such quantities that we all expected to meet death together. The cave seemed to be small. I took a hoe and made for myself at the mouth of the cave a restingplace about the size of a prayer-carpet. I dug down in the snow as deep as my breast, and yet did not reach the ground. This hole afforded me some shelter from the wind, and I sat down in it. Some desired me to go into the cavern, but I would not go. I felt that for me to be in a warm dwelling, while my men were in the midst of snow and drift,- for me to be within, enjoying sleep and ease, while my followers were in trouble and distress,- would be inconsistent with what I owed them, and a deviation from that society in suffering which was their due. I continued, therefore, to sit in the drift. Ambition admits not of inaction; May find repose save royalty alone. By leadership like this, the descendant of Tamerlane became the ruler of Kabul. He celebrates its charms in verse: Its verdure and flowers render Kabul, in spring, a heaven,— but this kingdom was too small for a man of Baber's stamp. used it as a stepping-stone to the conquest of India (1526). Return a hundred thanks, O Baber! for the bounty of the merciful God Has given you Sind, Hind, and numerous kingdoms; If, unable to stand the heat, you long for cold, You have only to recollect the frost and cold of Ghazni. He In spite of these verses, Baber did not love India, and his monarchy was an exile to him. Let the last extract from his memoirs be a part of a letter written in 1529 to an old and trusted friend in Kabul. It is an outpouring of the griefs of his inmost heart to his friend. He says: My solicitude to visit my western dominions (Kabul) is boundless and great beyond expression. I trust in Almighty Allah that the time is near at hand when everything will be completely settled in this country. As soon as matters are brought to that state, I shall, with the permission of Allah, set out for your quarters without a moment's delay. How is it possible that the delights of those lands should ever be erased from the heart? How is it possible to forget the delicious melons and grapes of that pleasant region? They very recently brought me a single muskmelon from Kabul. While cutting it up, I felt myself affected with a strong feeling of loneliness and a sense of my exile from my native country, and I could not help shedding tears. [He gives long instructions on the military and political matters to be attended to, and continues without a break:-] At the southwest of Besteh I formed a plantation of trees; and as the prospect from it was very fine, I called it Nazergah [the view]. You must there plant some beautiful trees, and all around sow beautiful and sweet-smelling flowers and shrubs. [And he goes straight on:-] Syed Kasim will accompany the artillery. [After more details of the government he quotes fondly a little trivial incident of former days and friends, and says:-] Do not think amiss of me for deviating into these fooleries. I conclude with every good wish. The 'Memoirs' of Baber deserve a place beside the writings of the greatest of generals and conquerors. He is not unworthy to be classed with Cæsar as a general and as a man of letters. His character was more human, more frank, more lovable, more ardent. His fellow in our western world is not Cæsar, but Henri IV. of France and Navarre. Edward S. Holden B BABRIUS (First Century A. D.) ABRIUS, also referred to as Babrias and Gabrias, was the writer of that metrical version of the folk-fables, commonly referred to Æsop, which delights our childhood. Until the time of Richard Bentley he was commonly thought of merely as a fabulist whose remains had been preserved by a few grammarians. Bentley, in the first draft (1697) of the part of his famous 'Dissertation treating of the fables of Æsop, speaks thus of Babrius, and goes not far out of his way to give a rap at Planudes, a late Greek, who turned works of Ovid, Cato, and Cæsar into Greek: came one Babrius, that gave a new turn of the fables into choliambics. Nobody that I know of mentions him but Suidas, Avienus, and Tzetzes. There's one Gabrias, indeed, yet extant, that has comprised each fable in four sorry iambics. But our Babrius is a writer of another size and quality; and were his book now extant, it might justly be opposed, if not preferred, to the Latin of Phædrus. There's a whole fable of his yet preserved at the end of Gabrias, of The Swallow and the Nightingale. Suidas brings many citations out of him, all which show him an excellent poet. There are two parcels of the present fables; the one, which are the more ancient, one hundred and thirty-six in number, were first published out of the Heidelberg Library by Neveletus, 1610. The editor himself well observed that they were falsely ascribed to Æsop, because they mention holy monks. To which I will add another remark, — that there is a sentence out of Job. Thus I have proved one-half of the fables now extant that carry the name of Æsop to be above a thousand years more recent than he. And the other half, that were public before Neveletus, will be found yet more modern, This collection, therefore, is more recent than and the latest of all. 1149 that other; and, coming first abroad with Æsop's Life,' written by Planudes, 'tis justly believed to be owing to the same writer. That idiot of a monk has given us a book which he calls The Life of Esop,' that perhaps cannot be matched in any language for ignorance and nonsense. He had picked up two or three true stories, that Esop was a slave to a Xanthus, carried a burthen of bread, conversed with Croesus, and was put to death at Delphi; but the circumstances of these and all his other tales are pure invention. But of all his injuries to Æsop, that which can least be forgiven him is the making such a monster of him for ugliness, an abuse that has found credit so universally that all the modern painters since the time of Planudes have drawn him in the worst shapes and features that fancy could invent. 'Twas an old tradition among the Greeks that Æsop revived again and lived a second life. Should he revive once more and see the picture before the book that carries his name, could he think it drawn for himself?- or for the monkey, or some strange beast introduced in the Fables'? But what revelation had this monk about Æsop's deformity? For he must have it by dream or vision, and not by ordinary methods of knowledge. He lived about two thousand years after him, and in all that tract of time there's not a single author that has given the least hint that Æsop was ugly.» Thus Bentley; but to return to Babrius. Tyrwhitt, in 1776, followed this calculation of Bentley by collecting the remains of Babrius. A publication in 1809 of fables from a Florentine manuscript foreran the collection (1832) of all the fables which could be entirely restored. In 1835 a German scholar, Knoch, published whatever had up to that time been written on Babrius, or as far as then known by him. So much had been accomplished by modern scholarship. The calculation was not unlike the mathematical computation that a star should, from an apparent disturbance, be in a certain quarter of the heavens at a certain time. The manuscript of Babrius, it became clear, must have existed. In 1842 M. Mynas, a Greek, who had already discovered the 'Philosophoumena' of Hippolytus, came upon the parchment in the convent of St. Lama on Mount Athos. He was employed by the French government, and the duty of giving the new ancient to the world fell to French scholars. The date of the manuscript they referred to the tenth century. There were con tained in it one hundred and twenty-three of the supposed one hundred and sixty fables, the arrangement being alphabetical and ending with the letter O. Again, in 1857 M. Mynas announced another discovery. Ninety-four fables and a prooemium were still in a convent at Mount Athos; but the monks, who made difficulty about parting with the first parchment, refused to let the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be the tinkering of a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was Mynas himself. And there were scholars who accounted the manuscript as genuine. The discovery of the first part added substantially to the remains which we have of the poetry of ancient Greece. The terseness, simplicity, and humor of the poems belong to the popular classic all the world over, in whatever tongue it appears; and the purity of the Greek shows that Babrius lived at a time when the influence of the classical age was still vital. He is placed at various times. Bergk fixes him so far back as B. C. 250, while others place him at the same number of years in our own era. Both French and German criticism has claimed that he was a Roman. There is no trace of his fables earlier than the Emperor Julian, and no metrical version of the Æsopean fables existed before the writing of Babrius. Socrates tried his hand at a version or two. But when such Greek writers as Xenophon and Aristotle refer to old folk-tales and legends, it is always in their own words. His fables are written in choliambic verse; that is, imperfect iambic which has a spondee in the last foot and is fitted for the satire for which it was originally used. The fables of Babrius have been edited, with an interesting and valuable introduction, by W. G. Rutherford (1883), and by F. G. Schneidewin (1880). They have been turned into English metre by James Davies, M. A. (1860). The reader is also referred to the article Æsop' in the present work. B THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN ETWIXT the North wind and the Sun arose A contest, which would soonest of his clothes THE fable means, "My son, at mildness aim: |