“Antiquary,” chap. xii.
All this is extinct now, but the beggar is not extinct, and never will be, as we are told. What then is to be done? for we are all more or less responsible for their existence. It seems to me that there is only one thing to be done, namely, to give up, every one of us, whatever quotum of our income we think right, and to hand it over to such societies as take the trouble to find out for us some not quite undeserving poor. Our Charity Organisation Society does no doubt much good, but it should have another branch, the members of which should be understood to give, say, a tenth part, or any other quotum of their annual income for charitable purposes. Such a society existed formerly. The members of it were not subjected to any inquisitorial questions. They simply declared that they would regularly devote a tenth of their income to the alleviation of poverty, and they were left perfectly free to do it each in his own way. What has become of that society? The organiser and leading spirit of it died, and no one seems to have taken it up again.
There is, however, one class of beggars and impostors more objectionable than any—people who do not beg for money, but borrow, and never mean to return either the money or any thanks. I have known of a good many cases where young men visiting Oxford and having made a few acquaintances among the undergraduates, were invited to dinner in college, and not only borrowed from their young companions, but, introduced by their young friends, ran up bills among the tradesmen of the town, and then quietly slipped away, leaving their friends to satisfy their creditors as best they could. All this goes on, and it seems impossible to stop it. Even if now and then these swindlers make a mistake, and place themselves within the clutches of the law, what satisfaction is it to keep them in prison for a month or two? No one knows their real names. They are boarded and fed at the expense of the country, and enjoy a little rest from their labours. That is all. They go in and come out of prison as if nothing had happened, and all they have learnt in prison is how to be more careful in future.
Who can doubt that there is much poverty and suffering, even undeserved suffering, among the poor, more particularly among poor foreigners in London? The Society for the Relief of Foreigners in Distress does much, but that much is but like a drop of milk in an ocean of salt water. The stories of the applicants printed each year, and carefully sifted by the committee, are simply heart-rending. And those who go to see for themselves often wish they had never crossed the thresholds of these hovels in which whole families live huddled up together, hungry, sick, dying, dead. One feels utterly hopeless and helpless at the sights one sees. One might as well jump into the Atlantic to save a sinking vessel and a drowning crew as attempt to rescue this drowning humanity.
And the men, after all, can help themselves. They can work, they may fight and beg, and even steal, and be sent to prison. But what is the fate of the poor unfortunate women!
There is one more class of beggars, though they would indignantly protest against such a name, who have given me great trouble. They are gentlemen who have something to sell and who are willing to sell it to you as a great favour. In Oxford these gentlemen have generally manuscripts to sell, ancient, valuable, unique. As I spent a good deal of my time at the Bodleian Library, and was there every day for several years as Oriental librarian, I made some curious acquaintances. After some time I never trusted a man who offered to sell scarce manuscripts or unique books to the library. My experiences were many, most of them painful. Perhaps the most interesting was when we received a visit from the famous forger, Simonides. Fortunately his fame had preceded him. There had been a full account of his doings and misdoings abroad, yet he arrived quite unabashed with a box full of Greek MSS. I had warned our librarian, the Rev. H. O. Coxe, and it was amusing to watch the two when their pourparlers began. Simonides—so called, not because he was a descendant of the poet Simonides, but (with a long î) because his ancestor was one Simon, a Jew—addressed the librarian half in ancient Greek, half in modern English. He knew both equally well. His manners were most engaging. The librarian was equally polite, and began to examine some of the Greek MSS. “These are of small value,” Simonides said, “they are modern. What century would you assign to them?” The librarian assigned the thirteenth century to them, and Simonides fully agreed. He then went on producing MS. after MS., but claiming for none of them more than the twelfth or tenth century. All went on most amicably until he produced some fragments of an uncial Greek MS. The librarian opened his eyes wide, and, examining them very carefully, put some of them aside for further consideration. Becoming more and more confidential, Simonides at last produced a real treasure. “This,” he said, “ought to repose nowhere but in the Bodleian Library. And what century would you assign to it, Mr. Librarian?” Simonides said with a smile and a respectful bow. Mr. Coxe turned over a few pages, and, looking very grave, though never quite without his usual twinkle, “The second half of the nineteenth century, sir,” he said, “and now pack up your MSS. and Apage (begone).”
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.
When Simonides had finished his masterpiece, he boldly offered it to the highest tribunal, the Royal Berlin Academy. The best chemists of the time examined it microscopically, and could find no flaw. Lepsius, the great Egyptologist, went through the whole text, and declared that the book could not be a forgery, because no one except Uranios could have known the names of the ancient Egyptian kings and the right dates of the various dynasties, which were exactly such as he had settled them in his books. The thought that Simonides might have consulted these very books never entered anybody’s mind. Great was the excitement in the camp of the Egyptologists, and, though the price demanded by Simonides was shamefully extravagant, Bunsen persuaded the then King of Prussia, Frederick William IV., to pay it and to secure the treasure for Berlin. Dindorf, the famous Greek scholar, had been entrusted by Simonides with the editing of the text, and he had chosen the Clarendon Press at Oxford to publish the first specimen of it. In the meantime unfavourable reports of Simonides reached the German authorities, and during a new examination of the MS. some irregularities were detected in the shape of the uncial M, and at last one passage was discovered by a very strong microscope where the blue ink had run across the letters of the modern Greek text. No doubt could then remain that the whole MS. was a forgery. Part of it had actually been printed at the Clarendon Press, and I was able to secure six copies of Dindorf’s pamphlet, which was immediately destroyed, and has now become one of the scarcest books in any library. After I had secured my copy, I read on the first page κὰτ’ ἐμὴν ἰδέαν, which was intended for “According to my idea.” I went straight to the then Master of Balliol, Dr. Scott, of Greek Lexicon fame. I asked him whether he thought such an expression possible before the fifteenth century A.D. He took down his Stephanus, but after looking for some time and hesitating, he admitted at last that such an expression was certainly not quite classical. Simonides had, of course, to refund the money, and was sent to prison, never to appear again in the libraries of Europe. A number of his forgeries, however, exist in England, in public and private collections; among them portraits of the Virgin Mary and some of the Apostles painted by St. Luke, a copy of Homer with a dedication from Perikles to the tyrant of Syrakuse, other Greek MSS. written on paper made of human skin, etc. His forged MS. of Uranios was such a masterpiece that he was offered £100 for it, but he declined, and I have never been able to find out what has been the end of it.
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.