Even more obliging is 'Thomas Tertius Okey, medicinæ Professor, 1697.' He was, he tells us, 'great grandson to William Okey (usually cal'd Okely) of Church Norton, betwixt Gloucester and Tewxsbury, gentelman; grandson to Thomas Primus Okey of Church Norton, the Devizes and Taunton, Professor of Theology; eldest son to Thomas Secundus Okey, of the Devizes and London, Professor of Physick, and father to Thomas Quartus Okey, of London, gentelman. The above mentioned Thomas Tertius Okey, Professor of Physick, now liveth in London near the Bodys of his deceased relations.' Before such details as these, even John Collet seems reticent. Sir Philip Sydenham--whose peculiarities in the matter of book-plates are elsewhere commented upon--in one of his first examples, dated in 1699, tells us his age: 'Sir Philip Sydenham, Bart., of Brympton in Somerset, and M.A. of the University of Cambridge, Æta. Suæ 23.' Richard Towneley in 1702 does the same. The inscription on his book-plate reads, as we see by the frontispiece: 'Ex libris Bibliothecæ Domesticæ Richardi Towneley de Towneley In Agro Lancastrensi Armigeri Anno {Ætatis: 73 {Domini: 1702.' One cannot help wondering why Mr. Towneley--the owner, and in a great part the collector, of the vast library with which the family name is connected--should have waited till he was seventy-three years of age to have a book-plate engraved. Some of the volumes in that library had a curious stamp in silver of the Towneley arms, with the date 1603 on their bindings, but there does not seem to have been an earlier book-plate. Richard Towneley died at York in 1707. Besides being an astronomer and a mathematician, he was a keen antiquary; and Thoresby, the historian of Leeds, tells us of the pride with which he showed him a wondrous and just completed pedigree of the Towneley family, on the occasion of their meeting during the year in which the book-plate was engraved. 'John Fenwick of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Attorney at Law,' leaves us in ignorance as to his age at the time his book-plate was engraved, because he does not date it; but he states that he was 'born at Hexham, 14th April 1787,' and 'married at Alnwick, 9th June 1814.' One lady--and only one--lets us into what, with those of her sex, is usually a secret. Isabel de Menezes inscribes her book-plate by Bartolozzi (see p. 94), 'Ætatis 71 anno 1798.' I have given, in this chapter, no foreign examples of book-plates on which minute personal particulars appear; but some of the examples of which I have spoken elsewhere--notably the Flemish book-plate of Count vander Noot--will show that they exist. CHAPTER XI LADIES' BOOK-PLATES