office the English king, James i., offered him free education for a Greek whom he might send over for the purpose. The fortunate recipient of this favour was Metrophanes Critopulus, who sadly disappointed his patrons by his extravagance and pretentiousness. Probably he was a clever if not a high-principled young man. In Germany the Lutherans assign to his authorship, "A Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East." On his return to Egypt he became a metropolitan, and he ultimately attained to the patriarchate of Alexandria—of course, like Cyril, for the "orthodox" Greek Church there. The bulk of the Egyptians were of the Monophysite Coptic Church.
Cyril opened up a correspondence with Archbishop Laud, whom he presented with an Arabic Pentateuch "as a sign of brotherly love"; this is now preserved in Oxford, at the Bodleian Library. When on his travels he had secured a fifth century manuscript of the Scriptures at Mount Athos. This was the oldest accessible Greek Bible, the two older manuscripts which scholars now use being as yet unknown—namely, the Vatican, locked up in the pope's library, and the Sinaitic, lying undiscovered in the monastery of St. Catherine. All English students have reason to think of the name of Cyril Lucar with gratitude, for he presented his precious manuscript to the English nation in the person of King Charles i. It now lies open to view under a glass case in the King's Library at the British Museum—one of the most valuable of all the valuable treasures owned by Great Britain. We know it as the Alexandrian manuscript, not like the Sinaitic as named after the place where it was found, nor because it represents the Alexandrian text—which is the text of the Vatican and the Sinaitic manuscripts—but simply because its donor was the patriarch of Alexandria, so that it came to England immediately from that city.
Cyril commenced his reforming efforts in the Greek Church while at Alexandria. In the year 1621 he became patriarch of Constantinople, where he still laboured in the
