proclamation, identifying them with the gates of carved sandalwood which Mahmud according to tradition, had taken from the celebrated Hindu temple of Somnath in 1025, announced to the people of India that “the insult of eight hundred years had been avenged.”  The gates were conveyed on a triumphal car through the towns of northern India to the Agra Fort, and deposited there with great ceremony.  As a matter of fact, the wood is deodar, and not sandalwood, and from the style of the ornament there can be hardly a doubt that the gates were made at or near Ghazni.  One glance would convince any expert in Oriental archaeology that they could not by any possibility have been the gates of a Hindu temple.

It has been supposed that the original gates were destroyed by fire, and that these were made to replace them, but there seems to be considerable doubt whether Mahmud really took away any gates from the Somnath temple.  It certainly would have been unusual for the great Muhammadan plunderer to have burdened himself with an archaeological relic which, in those days, was not easily convertible into cash.

A horse-shoe which is nailed to the gate is not, as is generally supposed, a propitiation of the Goddess of Fortune, but a token from the owner of some sick animal that he would bring an offering to the shrine in the event of a cure resulting from his visit.  This was an old custom among the Tartars and other nomad tribes, who valued horses and cattle as their most precious possessions.

The Jahangiri Mahal.

The palace called after Jahangir, the Jahangiri Mahal, is in many respects the most remarkable building of its class in India.  Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the extreme elegance, bordering on effeminacy, of the marble pavilions of Shah Jahan’s palaces, and the robust, virile, yet highly imaginative architecture of this palace of Akbar; for though it bears Jahangir’s name there cannot be much doubt that it was planned, and partially, if not completely, carried out by Akbar with the same architects who built Fatehpur Sikri.  It is the perfected type of the style which we see in process of evolution at Fatehpur, and were it not for the Taj, we might regret the new element which came into Mogul architecture with Itmad-ud-daulah’s tomb.  Both of these styles, which appear side by side in the Agra Fort, are intensely typical of the men and the times which produced them.  The one is stamped throughout with the personality of Akbar, the empire-builder, and distinguished by the stately solidity of Jain and Hindu architecture.  In the other the native vigour of the earlier Indian styles has been softened by the cultured eclecticism of Persia and Arabia, for the manly dignity of Akbar’s court had given place to the sensual luxury of Shah Jahan’s.