Finally there is yet a third class of ballads, neither written by professional ballad-writers, nor by sailors themselves, but by professional men of letters. The popularity of the ballad induced writers to adopt that form of composition in order to catch the ear of the multitude. Hence a considerable number of satirical compositions cast in that mould, such as the verses against Torrington and Byng, given on pp. 110, 206 of this volume, and other pieces written with a direct political purpose. The typical specimen of this class of ballad is _Hosier’s Ghost_, by Richard Glover, a professional poet who had already published a blank verse epic, and treated this subject in the fashion most likely to appeal to the multitude in order to secure their support for the attack on Walpole’s foreign policy. Other professional authors, too, without any political object to serve, adopted the same form because they perceived that the sailor was a popular topic, and that his perils, his loves and his diversions, afforded good material for verse, if they were treated on the traditional lines. Dibdin was anticipated by Gay and Stevens, and many others whom the world has forgotten. But whatever popularity they attained in their own day, their productions have no claim to inclusion in these pages, for they merely represent a literary fashion, and are too artificial to possess any value for historical purposes. Moreover the best of them are so well known that it is unnecessary to reprint them, but two or three early examples have been inserted in order to show when this species of naval verse began to appear and how it originated. It has also seemed needful to give incidentally some brief account of the poetical literature which illustrates various periods in the history of the growth of English sea-power.