Again, the book-plate of 'S^{r} Will^{m} Robinson, Baronett, of Newby, in the county of York, 1702,' was altered--by turning the '0' into a '6'--into 1762, and was used by his grandson; that inscribed 'John Peachey, 1782,' designed in the Chippendale style, is quite twenty years earlier; and that of 'Fr. Dickens Armig. 1795,' was certainly engraved half a century before. During the ten or twelve years immediately following the year 1698, the number of English dated book-plates is exceedingly large. Taking the list printed for private distribution by Sir Wollaston Franks in 1887, we find sixteen examples in 1698; seven in 1699; fifteen in 1700; sixteen in 1701; forty-four in 1702; fifty-eight in 1703; twenty-seven in 1704; and many, but not so many, in the succeeding years. Something--what, I have failed to discover--must have given a stimulus to the fashion of using book-plates just at the close of the seventeenth and opening of the eighteenth century; and not only to using them, but also to putting a date on those used. It is a fact that it is more rare to find book-plates engraved in this particular style without dates than with them. The fashion of 'dating,' as a rule, went out about the year 1714, about the time at which, as we shall see, a new 'style' in book-plates became generally adopted. Anonymous book-plates are rare after this date, though, both in England and on the Continent, they were, in early times, certainly common--a fact which bears silent testimony to the much greater intimacy which people in the good old days had with their neighbours' armorial bearings. The coat of arms of a man of position was almost as well known to those dwelling about him as were the features of his face; and if a volume, having within it an Armorial book-plate, happened to be found in wrongful custody, the finder might recognise the heraldry of the owner, even if he could not read the inscription recording that ownership. So much for the early use of book-plates in England. In the next chapter I propose to say something about the leading styles of decoration employed by their designers. FOOTNOTES: [4] There are two sizes of this book-plate. [5] Report by the Historical MSS. Commission on the papers of the Duke of Rutland. CHAPTER III 'STYLES' IN ENGLISH BOOK-PLATES LORD DE TABLEY has given us names for nearly all the styles met with in English book-plates, and it is perhaps better to accept these descriptions in the present work, adding to them another--'Simple Armorial'--for the earliest plates, and, indeed, for the great majority of those anterior to 1720.