Some years afterwards another forger of the name of Shapira offered to the British Museum some scrolls of parchment containing the text of the Pentateuch from the hand of Moses. They, too, were very closely criticised, and were exhibited for some time at the Museum; nay, a Commission was appointed to report on the MS., for which, very naturally, an enormous sum was demanded. It was perfectly well known, of course, among Semitic scholars that writing for literary purposes was unknown at the time of Moses, and that the very alphabet used by the forger belonged to a much later period. Poor Shapira, whose name had already become notorious as connected with the spurious Moabite antiquities, which he had sold at Berlin, professed to be so dejected when the fraud was discovered, a fraud, as he stated, not committed by himself, but practised on him by some Arabs, that he went to Belgium, and there, according to the newspapers, committed suicide; while some of his victims maintained that even then the newspaper paragraphs on his suicide were a forgery, and that he had retired from an ungrateful world under the veil of a new name. It is extraordinary how low a man may sink who once takes to this kind of trade. A Greek gentleman whom I knew, and who moved in the very best society in London, who held a responsible position in a bank, where he was trusted with any amount of money, roused the suspicions of the authorities in the coin department of the British Museum. He possessed himself a very valuable collection of ancient coins, and was admitted to all the privileges of a special student of numismatics.