104     HISTORIANS OF fL-KHANf PERIOD    [bk i ch. ii

Deputy for Adrianople in the Turkish Parliament. Both
works are written in the same metre (the mutaqdrib) as the
Shdh-ndma of Firdawsi, of which they are imitations, but
the second is only about half the length of the first (some¬
thing between 9000 and 10,000 couplets) ^ Neither of these
two works appears to be of any exceptional merit either
as history or poetry, though useful information about the
period of which they treat could no doubt be extracted
from them by patient examination.

* In the short prose preface describing how the poem came to be
written for Sultan Uways, who had restored the pension enjoyed by
the author, then fifty years of age, under Ghazan Khan, the number of
verses is stated as 10,000.