To this time of national ferment belongs a publication of which we know nothing but the title, a _Serious Address_; and also one of our rare glimpses of the novelist's home life. Joseph Warton writes to his brother Tom, on October 29, 1746:--"I wish you had been with me last week when I spent two evenings with Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple, and you may guess I was very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd pretty soon, but Russell and I sat up with the Poet till one or two in the morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me, I fancy, on my Father's account." Joseph Warton's father was Vicar of Basingstoke, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and moreover, something of a Jacobite; whereby, we may surmise, that the _True Patriot_ did not allow his staunch Hanoverian sentiments too great an invasion into his private society. Alas, that it did not occur to Warton to preserve, for the entertainment of later ages, some fuller record of those two _noctes ambrosianae_. This sister, Sally Fielding as her cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called her, made some figure in the literary world of the day. Richardson extolled her "knowledge of the human heart"; Murphy writes of her "lively and penetrating genius"; and her classical scholarship is attested by a translation of Xenophon's _Memorabilia_. That she also shared some of the engaging qualities of her brother may be assumed from the lines written to the memory of the "esteemed and loved ... Mrs. Sarah Fielding," by her friend Dr. John Hoadley. "Her unaffected Manners, candid Mind, Her Heart benevolent, and Soul resign'd; Were more her Praise than all she knew or thought Though Athens Wisdom to her Sex she taught."