Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/337

 CHAP. X. MUGHAL ARCHITECTURE. 287 arranged in panels carved with the most exquisite designs and ornamented with parti-coloured marbles. It is 168 ft. long by 44 ft. 6 in. wide, and about 44 ft. high. The brackets under the balconies are the precursors of the type so marked in the red sandstone palace in the fort at Agra ; and the pendentives inside, below the dome, are effective. One important dome, pierced with twelve small windows, crowns the centre ; it has, however, no minarets and no courtyard, but even without these adjuncts it is one of the most satisfactory buildings of its class in India. In the citadel at Agra there stood when I was there, a fragment of a palace built by Sher Shah, or his son Salim, which was as exquisite a piece of decorative art as anything of its class in India. Being one of the first to occupy the ground, this palace was erected on the highest spot within the fort ; hence our Government, fancying this a favourable site for the erection of a barrack, pulled it down, and replaced it by a more than usually hideous brick erection of their own. This afterwards became a warehouse, and looms, in whitewashed ugliness, over the marble palaces of the Mughals a fit standard of comparison of the tastes of the two races. 1 Judging from the fragment that remains, and the accounts received on the spot, this palace must have gone far to justify the eulogium more than once passed on the works of these Pathans that "they built like giants, and finished like gold- smiths : " for the stones seem to have been of enormous size, and the details of most exquisite finish. It has passed away, how- ever, like many another noble building of its class, under the ruthless barbarism of our rule. Mosques we have generally spared, and sometimes tombs, because they were unsuited to our economic purposes, and it would not answer to offend the religious feelings of the natives. But when we deposed the kings, and appropriated their revenues, there was no one to claim their now useless abodes of splendour. It was consequently found cheaper either to pull them down, or use them as residences or arsenals, than to keep them up, so that very few now remain for the admiration of posterity. The tomb of Sher Shah has been already described (ante, p. 218), as it is essentially Pathan in style. It was erected at his native place in Bihar, to the south of the Ganges, far from Mughal influence at that time, and in the style of severe simplicity that characterised the works of his race between the 1 As I cannot find any trace of this building in Keene's description of the fort in his book on Agra, I presume it must have been utilised since my day. Unless it is the building he calls the Nobut Khana of Akbar's palace (26). I have never seen it in any photograph of the place.