The Memoirs of Bābur 911.9.2

911.9.2

Hilālī (New-moon) was another; he is still alive.[1160] Correct and graceful though his odes are, they make little impression. There is a _dīwān_ of his;[1161] and there is also the poem (_mas̤nawī_) in the [Sidenote: Fol. 181b.] _khafīf_ measure, entitled _Shāh and Darwīsh_ of which, fair though many couplets are, the basis and purport are hollow and bad. Ancient poets when writing of love and the lover, have represented the lover as a man and the beloved as a woman; but Hilālī has made the lover a darwīsh, the beloved a king, with the result that the couplets containing the king's acts and words, set him forth as shameless and abominable. It is an extreme effrontery in Hilālī that for a poem's sake he should describe a young man and that young man a king, as resembling the shameless and immoral.[1162] It is heard-said that Hilālī had a very retentive memory, and that he had by heart 30 or 40,000 couplets, and the greater part of the Two Quintets,—all most useful for the minutiae of prosody and the art of verse. Ahlī[1163] was another; he was of the common people (_`āmī_), wrote verse not bad, even produced a _dīwān_. (_l. Artists._) Of fine pen-men there were many; the one standing-out in _nakhsh ta`līq_ was Sl. `Alī of Mashhad[1164] who copied many books for the Mīrzā and for `Alī-sher Beg, writing daily 30 couplets for the first, 20 for the second.