The name of the Christian patriarch, at that period in Alexandria, was Cyrill, whose family had, for upwards of a hundred years before his time, produced bishops, who had been much more serviceable to their own family connections than they had ever been towards the propagation of the Christian faith. The present was proud, litigious, and revengeful, vindictive and intolerant to the last degree; his ignorance debasing his own character as a man, and scandalising the religion of which he was so unworthy a minister. He stupidly conceived himself sanctioned in everything which his foolish and mistaken ideas might dictate to be for the glory of God, and acted as a persecutor, prosecutor, judge, and executioner: he had condemned Nestorias without hearing his defence. As the city of Alexandria was then very flourishing on account of its extended commerce, the emperor had there allowed greater toleration and more peculiar privileges to all religions, than in any other place: it consequently contained, among others, a great number of Jews, who carried on a most extensive trade, as well as a great many Pagan families. In the eyes of the bigot Cyrill this was wrong; he would have the sheep-fold clean, and the Jews must be banished. The governor, however, who was a man of prudence and sober discretion, much better acquainted with the real interests of the city, opposed a measure he saw replete with mischief, and even caused to be condemned to death a Christian profligate, who had injured the Jews. This malefactor was, by the express order of Cyrill, buried in the church as a martyr; and he collected an army of five hundred lazy monks, who abused the governor in the public streets, and excited an insurrection among the people against the Jews, so that the debased race of Abraham was expelled from the city where they had so long existed unmolested from the time of Alexander the Great.