But though Michael Burghers's somewhat unbeautiful allegory may not have pleased Thomas Gore or his other English clients in 1675, nor the prettier allegory of Louis du Guernier have generally commended itself to people in this country in 1710, allegory, if not in the work of these artists, was bound sooner or later to come into fashion on English book-plates, seeing that it was, and for long had been, fashionable across the Channel. There have been few outbreaks of disease on the Continent that have not infected this country,--at all events, slightly. The foreigners whom the foreign king, on his arrival in England in 1688, brought with him engendered foreign ways and foreign fashions at Court, and these ways and fashions were in turn adopted by people who did not go to Court, and that is how allegory crept into the book-plates of the rank and file of Englishmen. The first English engraver, born and bred, to execute an Allegoric book-plate was John Pine, himself a man of letters, and one with whose features Hogarth has made us familiar. In 1736 he was employed to design and engrave a book-plate to place in the thirty thousand volumes of Bishop Moore's library, which George I. had bought, in 1715, to present to the University of Cambridge, but which were not suitably housed till 1734. No doubt Pine was fully impressed with the munificence of the gift,--a mass of volumes which the heavy-headed king would have never opened had he kept, and never understood had he opened them. His task was to design a book-plate commensurate with the royal munificence, and he probably considered he had been equal to the occasion when he produced what we see opposite the next page. Lord De Tabley's words so accurately describe this pompous production, that I will quote them:--