Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: audience. Everything at court depended on the monarch's personal favor. The nobles were fearfully anxious lest they should offend a man who could ruin them by a word, and studied day and night the art of pleasing him. One day the monarch ordered that Van Goens's bodyguard should be called in, but gave the command to no one by name; instantly two or three hundred nobles started off, treading each other under foot in their wild desire to call six common soldiers. On another occasion the monarch summoned one of Van Goens's followers and the whole court, great and small, with the exception of the pangerans, rushed after him and introduced him, breathless with the confusion. The monarch laughed, and indeed the situation has its amusing side; it seems like a scene from a comic opera. A comic opera becomes a serious thing, however, when it assumes the place of a real government, and not all the incidents of Javanese court life were as innocent as those just described. At the time when this description was written the empire of Mataram was still young, and the central government exercised more efficient control over the under-kings or regents than was often the case. The hold of the sovereign on his subordinates seems generally to have consisted only in the above-mentioned obligation on their part to appear at court at certain periods.1 The regents were often nearly sovereign in their authority and can be regarded in the discussion of their administration as independent kings, ruling over districts roughly comparable in si/.e to counties in the Eastern States of America.1 The form of government presents about the same characteristics in all the different regencies. Every regent had one or more viziers or ministers (pateh), who attended to the actual business of administration, and... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.