From all which it may be inferred that Mr. Joseph Barber thought--or wanted other people to think--that the idea of using a book-plate was his own. Newcastle people, in 1743, must have been very unobservant of the habits of their neighbours if they believed Mr. Barber; for the fashion of using a book-plate--which in England came in some forty years before--was by that time general throughout the country. That some of the subscribers accepted the offer, and got their 'hundred plates on a good paper' for half-a-crown, is demonstrated by the existence of copies of the plates published with the 'equestrian statue,' being still found in books, doing duty as book-plates. Very poor productions they are, reflecting but slight credit on the designer or engraver. But what Joseph lacked in art, he atoned for in enterprise; we see this in his ingenious way of getting rid of his old copper-plates, and the postscript to his advertisement demonstrates the fact even more plainly, for on a day near at hand, the advertisement tells us, was to be fought, at a neighbouring cock-pit, 'a Welsh main,' and the prize was to be nothing less than one of the advertiser's engravings, 'a pretty piece of work, worthy the observation of the curious.' If the term book-plate had been known in Barber's day, it would probably have found its way into his advertisement, which is clumsy from the want of a word to express the very thing he is advertising. William Stephens, who engraved a good many book-plates in his time, could find no better expression than 'print of your arms' to describe the 800 book-plates which, for half-a-guinea, he sent to Dr. Samuel Kerrich, the Shakespearian student, in 1754. Horace Walpole, again, would, I think, have used the phrase 'book-plate' had he known it. In his _Catalogue of Engravers_--the edition of 1771--he speaks of George Vertue having engraved 'a plate to put in Lady Oxford's books'; and in his _Anecdotes of Painting_, he refers to the 'plate' which Hogarth 'used for his books.' One of his own book-plates--that engraved soon after 1791--Walpole describes as his 'seal': _Sigillum Horatii Comitis de Orford_; but this phrase is, I think, used simply because the book-plate itself is the representation of a mediæval seal. Bartolozzi--giving, in 1796, a receipt for a book-plate which he had just completed--refers to it as a 'ticket-plate' (see p. 94); but he was a foreigner, and may not have known the English name for such things, for we have seen that, some five years before, Ireland refers to Hogarth's 'book-plate.' Charles James Fox, in a note, dated at Leicester on 2nd August 1801, speaks of the 'book-plate' of his great-great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Fox.