b. The contents of the Rdmpur MS.
There are three separate items of composition in the manuscript, marked as distinct from one another by having each its ornamented frontispiece, each its scribe's sign (mini) of Finis, each its division from its neighbour by a space without entry. The first and second sections bear also the official sign [sahh] that the copy has been inspected and found correct.
(i) The first section consists of Babur's metrical translation of Khwaja 'Ubaidu'1-lah Ahrdri's Parental Tract (Wdlidiyyahn'sd/a), his prologue in which are his reasons for versifying the Tract and His epilogue which gives thanks for accomplishing the task. It ends with the date 935 (Hai. MS. f.346). Below this are mim and sahh, the latter twice ; they are in the scribe's handwriting, and thus make against supposing that Babur wrote down this copy of the Tract or its archetype from which the official sahh will have been copied. Moreover, spite of bearing two vouchers of being a correct copy, the Translation is emended, in a larger script which may be that of the writer of the marginal quatrain on the last page of the [Rampur] MS. and there attested by Shah-i-jahan as Babur's autograph entry. His also may have been the now expunged writing on the half-page left empty of text at the end of the Tract. Expunged though it be, fragments of words are visible.1
(2) The second section has in its frontispiece an inscription illegible (to me) in the Facsimile. It opens with a masnawi of 41 couplets which is followed by a ghazel and numerous poems in several measures, down to a triad of rhymed couplets (mat/a'?), the whole answering to descriptions of a Diwan without formal arrangement. After the last couplet are mim and sahh in the scribe's hand-writing, and a blank quarter-page. Mistakes in this section have been left uncorrected, which supports the view that its sahh avouches the accuracy of its archetype and not its own.2
1 Plate XI, and p. 15 (mid-page) of the Facsimile booklet The- Facsimile does not show the whole of the marginal quatrain, obviously because for the last page of the manuscript a larger photographic plate was needed than for the rest. With Dr. Ross' concurrence a photograph in which the defect is made good, accompanies this Appendix.
* The second section ends on Plate XVII, and p. 21 of the Facsimile booklet.
