In later times--the eighteenth century--other distinguished German artists 'stooped' to book-plate engraving. Amongst them was Daniel Nicholas Chodowiecki (the son of a Dantzig drug merchant), born in 1726. Chodowiecki is best known as a book-illustrator, in which his great knowledge of costume--at a period when the point was little studied--stood him in good stead. His book-plates are probably few; only four or five are known. One of the most elaborate in design is that of a German doctor of medicine, dated in 1792, nine years before the artist's death. In this example much of the sensational style of the generality of his work manifests itself. 'The book-plate,' says Lord De Tabley, 'in its motive reminds us much of those allegoric framed certificates of membership which various sick clubs and benefit societies accord to their members at the present day. In the foreground, Æsculapius is pushing out a skeleton draped in a long white sheet, with a scythe across its shoulder. The god is sturdily applying his serpent-twined staff to the somewhat too solid back of the terrible phantom. Behind, beneath a kind of pavilion, lies a sick person in bed; his hands are upraised in silent thankfulness as he watches the prowess of the healing deity.' The book-plate was engraved for Dr. C. S. Schintz. Besides this, Chodowiecki engraved, about 1770, a book-plate for himself, and, about ten years later, one for the French seminary at Berlin. [Illustration] The book-plate of Dr. Schintz calls to mind a somewhat earlier German example, engraved by Boetius from a design by Wernerin (whose signature appears on some varieties of the plate), about the middle of the last century. It is figured opposite, and is perhaps the most gloomy book-plate that it ever entered into the mind of man to conceive. A skeleton sits upon a coffin, or a coffin-shaped tomb, holding in his right hand a pair of scales, and in his left a scythe; in the lighter balance of the scales is a scroll, bearing the inscription, 'Dan. v. 25, _Mene Tekel_'; in the background we see monuments, Lombardy poplars or cypress-trees, and a distant landscape. This uninviting picture is contained in a frame, inscribed, in a medallion above, 'E Bibliotheca Woogiana,' and below, _Nominor â libra: libratus ne levis unquam Inveniar, præsta pondere, Christe, tuo_,--a motto in which the owner makes a play upon the derivation of his name from _wage_, the German for a weight or balance, and asks the bestowal of divine weight on the day of soul-weighing. As compared with German book-plates, those of other countries are sadly deficient in artistic composition. The former, particularly examples of the seventeenth century, are ornate and well designed.