[60] Before the incorporation of the Company brought English printing more easily under supervision, at least a few books had been issued by English printers with spurious foreign imprints, of which the most impudent was "At Rome under the Castle of St. Angelo." [61] Robert Barker himself was imprisoned for debt in the King's Bench at London in 1635, and died there in 1646. What is here written applies to his deputy, who may have been his son of the same name. [62] The assertion by Mr. Charles Evans (_American Bibliography_, p. 3) that one of these, "the Crowninshield copy, was privately sold by Henry Stevens to the British Museum for L157 10s.," despite its apparent precision, is an exasperating error. CHAPTER XIV ENGLISH WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS [Illustration: XXIX. WESTMINSTER, CAXTON, C. 1488 BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONES. (PART OF SIG. K 5 RECTO) CHRIST RAISING THE DAUGHTER OF JAIRUS] A few illuminated manuscripts of English workmanship and a few with illustrations in outline have come down to us from the fifteenth century, but amid the weary wars with France and the still wearier struggles of Yorkists and Lancastrians, the artistic spirit which had been so prominent in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seems to have died out altogether. Until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, or perhaps we should rather say until the advent of John Day, few English books were illustrated, and of these few quite a large proportion borrowed or copied their pictures from foreign originals. Nevertheless, English illustrated books are rightly sought after by English collectors, and though we may wish that they were better, we must give the best account of them we can.