comedy, "Love in Several Masques," of which, when it was published in
the following year, he sent her a copy. "I have presumed to send your
Ladyship a copy of the play which you did me the honour of reading three
acts last spring and hope it may meet as light a censure from your
Ladyship's judgment as then; for while your goodness permits me (what I
esteem the greatest and indeed only happening of my life) to offer my
unworthy performances to your perusal, it will be entirely from your
sentence that they will be regarded or disesteemed by me." Fielding
wrote Lady Mary another letter about four years later: "I hope your
Ladyship will honour the scenes which I presume to lay before you, with
your perusal. As they are written on a model I never yet attempted, I am
exceedingly anxious less they should find less mercy from you than my
lighter productions. It will be a slight compensation to 'The Modern
Husband' that your Ladyship's censure will defend him from the
possibility of any other reproof, since your least approbation will
always give me pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest applauses of
a theatre. For whatever has passed your judgment may, I think, without
any imputation of immodesty, refer want of success to want of judgment
in an audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting upon your
Ladyship at Twickenham to receive my sentence."

One evening when she arrived home, after having ridden twenty miles in
the moonlight, she found a box of books, and pouncing upon her cousin
Fielding's works, sat up all night reading.

"I think _Joseph Andrews_ better than his _Foundling._[13] I believe I
was the more struck with it, having at present a Fanny in my own house,
not only by the name, which happens to be the same, but the
extraordinary beauty, joined with an understanding yet more
extraordinary at her age, which is but few months past sixteen: she is