arch Canute "was looked upon, in those times of ignorance, as a very
extraordinary man, and supposed to be the greatest king of the world,
the sovereign of the seas and the land." The well-known story of his
pretending to command the waves, as related by the Khan, differs
considerably from the usually received version, and perhaps may be
better adapted to the notions prevalent in the East, where success by
stratagem is always considered preferable to a manly avowal of
incompetency. "One day he was seated on the sea-shore, when the waves
reached his chair. Canute commanded them to retire; and as the tide
happened to be actually ebbing at the time, the waters retreated to the
ocean. Then turning to his courtiers, he exclaimed, that the king whose
mandates were obeyed by the billows of the sea, as well as by the
children of men, was truly the monarch of the earth. Ever after this he
was regarded by the ignorant multitude with a sort of religious awe, and
was called Canute _the Great_, as we should say _Sahib-i-kiran_,"
(the Lord of the Conjunction, implying a man born under a peculiar
conjunction of planetary influences which predestines him to
distinguished fortunes.)

But of all the English monarchs whose reigns are noticed by the Khan,
the one who appears to stand highest, as a pious and patriotic king, in
his estimation--a distinction which he not improbably owes to his zeal
as an iconoclast, the use of images in worship being abhorred by the
Moslems--is no other than Henry VIII. No hint of the "gospel light that
beamed from Boleyn's eyes," or of the doom which overtook more than one
of his consorts, is allowed to interfere with the lustre of his
achievements; such allusions, indeed, would probably be regarded by the
Khan as unwarrantable violations of the privacy of the zenana. But in
order to set in a stronger light the difficulties which he had to
encounter, we have a circumstantial account of the rise of the Papal
power, and the exorbitant prerogatives assumed for some centuries
previously, by the Pope. "This personage was the monarch of Christendom,
something analogous to our holy khalifs, who were the heads of Islam and
the Mohammedan world; and from him the princes of Christendom received
investiture, as did our Mohammedan sovereigns from the khalifs of
Bagdad. The ecclesiastics every where gave out that the pontiff was the
vicegerent of God, and that every one who died without his blessing and
forgiveness would