Ill usage made volunteers scarce and increased the discontent of pressed men. Complaints against impressment, and references to the abuses to which it gave rise, become increasingly frequent during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The pressgang makes its first appearance in fiction in 1748 with Smollet’s account of the seizure of Roderick Random on Tower Hill, and his sufferings in the tender. The earliest caricature representing the operations of a press-gang is _English Liberty Displayed_, which belongs to the year 1770, when Wilkes and the London magistrates were opposing the execution of press warrants in the City (_Catalogue of Satirical Prints in the British Museum_, iv. 641). Next came Gillray’s _Liberty of the Subject_, published October 15, 1779. Our ballads supplement this evidence by stories such as those related in _The Lighterman’s Prentice_ and in the narrative of the eighteen Greenland men (pp. 201, 226, 234-36, 249). Another ballad called a _Dialogue between Will and Jack_, too long to insert, describes the general terror which prevailed about 1778 or 1779. The people seem all run mad, ‘for fear of the press they won’t lie in their beds’; farmers and millers send boys and girls and old men to the markets for them; carriers and carters, ‘like goats in the mountains, they lie in the fields’; and so with all other trades. The French are at sea to invade us, and now our bold sailors must fight for all. The King wants men and will find them out. The King found it difficult to get men, not merely because his service was unpopular, but also because there was a more profitable alternative.