If you turn back to p. 123 and look at the book-plate of Speratus, you will see that he had expressed very much this sentiment more than a century before. It is not till the beginning of the eighteenth century that we find any decided expression of possession on an English book-plate. Then it occurs on that of John Reilly (described on p. 53). At the very bottom of the design is printed: 'Clamabunt omnes te, liber, esse meum.' Here you see it is John Reilly himself and not his book that speaks. It is a mild and decidedly gentlemanly way of expressing ownership, free from threats for not returning the volume; indeed, hardly contemplating the possibility of so dishonest an act. About the same date as Reilly's book-plate is a very graceful German one, executed for Michael Lilienthal (figured on p. 165). It shows us a group of growing lilies, around which bees are hovering or tasting their sweetness, and below-- 'Use the book, but let no one misuse it; The bee does not stain the lilies, but only touches them.' From this graceful book-plate and the pleasantry of its inscription, we turn to a heavy declamatory sentence, devised, _circa_ 1730, by the librarian of the Benedictine monastery of Wessenbrun, in Bavaria, for the books in his charge to speak when a theft had been actually committed or was in contemplation: 'I am the rightful possession of the Cloister of Wessenbrun. Ho there! Restore me to my master, so right demands!' Sherlock Willis, whose book-plate--a decided 'Chippendale'--is dated in 1756, flies to Scripture for his aid against immoral borrowers, and places on his book-plate the familiar quotation from the 37th Psalm: 'The ungodly borroweth, and payeth not again.' Various other English book-plates bear the same quotation, or some other taken from the Bible. On that in use at the Parochial Library of Tadcaster, which shows us St. John in the isle of Patmos receiving from the angel the book which he was to eat, we read: 'Accipe librum et devora illum' (Rev. x. 9); advice which it was not, we may presume, intended that the borrower should follow literally. There is something very businesslike and to the point about the inscription on the book-plate of Charles Ferdinand Hommeau, which is dated six years after that of Sherlock Willis. The inscription reads in translation: 'If you do not return the loan within fourteen days, or do not keep it carefully, on another occasion [when you ask to borrow it or some other book] I shall say I have not got it.' So M. Hommeau will not mind telling a lie to protect his library; and what is more, does not mind telling the world of his intention to do so. Truly he was an honest liar.