During the first half of the eighteenth century a change in the character of the sea songs produced becomes gradually apparent. ‘Songs intended to bring before shore-going listeners the ways of seamen,’ as Sir Cyprian Bridge describes them, had been produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the output of them now greatly increased. They were designed not merely for the ordinary audience to which ballad-writers appealed, but for a higher class of hearers, for the theatre or the drawing-room as well as the street and the tavern. To hit genteel taste they became more sentimental in tone and more polished in diction and metre. They were written mostly by professional poets or men with some literary training. Gay led off. His two celebrated songs, _Black-eyed Susan_ and _’Twas when the seas were roaring_, mark the beginning of the movement which culminated in the productions of Dibdin. Both will be found in Mr. Stone’s _Sea Songs_, pp. 208, 209. Gay had many imitators. To this class belongs _Fair Sally loved a bonny sailor_ (p. 163), which probably suggested Dibdin’s _Token_. Set to music by Maurice Greene it enjoyed great popularity throughout the eighteenth century. _Come and listen to my ditty_ (p. 162), less artificial in form, obtained a still longer vogue, and was printed as a broadside as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. It furnished the tune for _Hosier’s Ghost_. Two other songs, if Smollet is to be trusted, became popular in the navy itself. _How pleasant a sailor’s life passes_ (p. 164) was the favourite of Roderick Random’s uncle Lieutenant Thomas Bowling. A quotation from it supplied the place of argument when the lieutenant persuaded Roderick to go to sea.