At length in 1887, Lipsius published a detailed study of it in Smith and Wace’s _Dictionary of Christian Biography_, in which full use was made of Köstlin’s analysis, and he agreed with that writer in assigning to it an Ophite origin, although he also drew attention to certain peculiarities which appeared to him Manichæan. In the same year there also appeared the second edition of C. W. King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, which gave for the first time to English readers translations of a great part of the work. The late Mr. King, then Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, had hitherto been known chiefly as a collector of ancient gems on which he had published many useful volumes, and he proposed, like his predecessors, to publish a full translation of the _Pistis Sophia_. At his death such a translation was found among his papers; but the failure of his eyesight, which had taken place even before the issue of the second edition of his _Gnostics_, had left it in such a condition that his executors decided against giving it to the public. It was confessedly made from Schwartze’s Græco-Latin version only; but Mr. King did much to attract public notice to the _Pistis Sophia_ by the excellent and dignified English in which his extracts from it were clothed, and the erudition which he brought to bear upon points like the less-known religions of the Roman Empire and the barbarous names and words left entirely unexplained in Schwartze’s version. He also asserted in his Preface, with much show of reason, that it was the statements made by him in his first edition that led Madame Blavatsky, whom he describes as “the Sibyl of Esoteric Buddhism,” to include the relics of Gnosticism among the foundations of what he refers to as “her new religion.”