But wooden trenchers, even in the first half of the first New England century, gave place to pewter, and the great number of pieces of pewter table-ware still found in New England country homes would alone prove to how recent a date pewter utensils were universally used. The number would doubtless be much larger if it were not deemed by metal-workers that new pewter is of much better substance if the metals composing it are combined with a certain amount of old pewter. Hence old pewter always has commanded a good price, and many fine old specimens have been melted up to mould over again for the more modern uses for which pewter is employed by printers and lapidaries. The trade of pewterer was for two centuries a very respectable and influential one. The Guild of Pewterers in London was a very large and powerful body, and English pewterers, men of worth, came with other tradesmen at once to the Colonies. Richard Graves was a pewterer of Salem in 1639, and Henry Shrimpton, an influential merchant who died in Boston in 1666, made large quantities of pewter ware for the Massachusetts colonists. The pewterers rapidly increased in numbers in America, until the War of Independence, when, of course, the increasing importation of Oriental and English china and stone-ware, and the beauty and interest of the new table-ware, destroyed forever the pewterer’s trade. Advertisements of pewter table furnishings appear frequently, however, in American newspapers until well into this century. Nor was it different in England at the same date. Englishmen and Englishwomen clung long to pewter. In a poem written in 1828 by J. Ward, of Stoke-upon-Trent, upon the Potter’s Art, he says: “The housewife, prim in days we know ourselves, Display’d her polished pewter on her shelves; Reserv’d to honour most the annual feast, Where ev’ry kinsman proved a welcome guest. No earthen plates or dishes then were known, Save at the humble board as coarse as stone, And there the trencher commonly was seen, With its attendant ample platter treen.” (Wooden.) It is a curious fact that in the inventory of the household possessions of Thomas Wedgwood, the potter, made at Burslem in 1775, we find that he had forty-four pewter plates worth seven pence half penny each, and twenty-four pewter dishes worth two shillings each, though the inventory of the goods at his factory at that time included two hundred and ninety-five dozen table plates of best white ware. At a very early date all well-to-do colonists had plenty of “latten ware,” which was brass, as well as pewter. All kinds of household utensils were made, however, of the latter metal; even “pewter bottles, pints, and quarts,” were upon a list of goods to be sent from England to the Massachusetts Colony in 1629. I have never seen an old pewter bottle, even in a collection or museum, and they must soon have been superseded by glass.