Simonides did as he was told, and, with an injured expression, walked away. Next day he wrote a Greek letter to the librarian, bitterly complaining about the _Apage_, and offering some more MSS. for his inspection. But all was in vain; too much had been discovered about him in the meantime. He was certainly a most extraordinary man—a scholar who, if he had applied his ingenuity to editing instead of forging Greek MSS., might have held a very high position. His greatest achievement was, of course, the newly discovered Greek text of the history of ancient Egypt by Uranios. The man possessed a large quantity of later Greek MSS. It seems that in the Eastern monasteries, where he sold, he also acquired some Greek MSS., by what means we must not ask. He tried several of these MSS. with chemicals to see whether, as was the fashion during the middle ages, the parchment on which they were written had been used before, and the old writing scraped off in order to get writing material for some legends of Christian saints or other modern compositions. When that has been the case, chemical appliances bring out the old writing very clearly, and he knew that in this way some very old and valuable Greek texts had been recovered. In that case the old uncial writing comes out generally in a dark blue, and becomes quite legible as underlying the modern Greek text. As Simonides was not lucky enough to discover or recover an ancient Greek text, or what is called a Palimpsest MS., the thought struck him that he might manufacture such a treasure, which would have sold at a very high price. But even this did not satisfy his ambition. He might have taken the text of the Gospels and written it between the lines of one of his modern Greek MSS., adding some startling various readings. In that case detection would have seemed much more difficult. But he soared higher. He knew that a man of the name of Uranios had written a history of Egypt which was lost. Simonides made up his mind to write himself in ancient Greek a history of Egypt such as he thought Uranios might have written. And, deep and clever as he was, he chose Bunsen’s “Egypt” and Lepsius’ “Chronology” as the authorities which he faithfully followed. After he had finished his Greek text, he wrote it in dark blue ink and in ancient uncial Greek letters between the letters of a Greek MS. of about 1200 a.d. Anybody who knows the smallness of the letters in such a MS. can appreciate the enormous labour it must have been to insert, as it were, beneath and between these minute lines of each letter the supposed earlier writing of Uranios, so that the blue ink should never encroach on the small but true Greek letters. One single mistake would have been fatal, and such is the knowledge which antiquaries now possess of the exact changes of Greek letters in every century that here, too, one single mistake in the outline of the old uncial letters would have betrayed the forger.