aval stories and dramas, and by artists who
took scenes of naval life for their subject. Violent seizure and
abduction lend themselves to effective treatment in literature
and in art, and writers and painters did not neglect what was
so plainly suggested.

A fruitful source of the widespread belief that our navy in the old
days was chiefly manned by recourse to compulsion, is a confusion
between two words of independent origin and different meaning,
which, in ages when exact spelling was not thought indispensable,
came to be written and pronounced alike. During our later great
maritime wars, the official term applied to anyone recruited by
impressment was 'prest-man.' In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and part of the eighteenth century, this term meant
the exact opposite. It meant a man who had voluntarily engaged to
serve, and who had received a sum in advance called 'prest-money.'
'A prest-man,' we are told by that high authority, Professor Sir
J. K. Laughton, 'was really a man who received the prest of 12d.,
as a soldier when enlisted.' In the 'Encyclopaedia Metropolitana'
(1845), we find:-- 'Impressing, or, more correctly, impresting,
i.e. paying earnest-money to seamen by the King's Commission to
the Admiralty, is a right of very ancient date, and established
by prescription, though not by statute. Many statutes, however,
imply its existence--one as far back as 2 Richard II, cap. 4.' An
old dictionary of James I's time (1617), called 'The Guide into
the Tongues, by the Industrie, Studie, Labour, and at the Charges
of John Minshew,' gives the following definition:--'Imprest-money.
G. [Gallic or French], Imprest-ance; _Imprestanza_, from _in_
and _prestare_, to lend or give beforehand.... Presse-money. T.
[Teutonic or German], Soldt, from salz, _salt_. For anciently
agreement or compact between the General and the soldier was
signified by salt.' Minshew also defines the expression 'to presse
souldiers' by the German _soldatenwerben_, and explains that
here the word _werben_ means prepare (_parare_). 'Prest-money,'
he says, 'is so-called of the French word _prest_, i.e. readie,
for that it bindeth those that have received it to be ready at
all times appointed.' In the posthumous work of Stephen Skinner,
'Etymologia Linguae Anglicanae' (1671), the author joins together
'press or imprest' as though they were the same, and gives two
definitions, viz.: (1) recruiting by force (_milites_cogere_);
(2) paying so