Sir Charles Sedley, 5th Baronet in 1702. The relationship with Ann Ayscough lasted to the end of Sedley's life. His reputation as a wit and dissolute was partially responsible for the Sedleys of William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". His most famous song, "Phyllis is My Only Joy", is much more widely known now than the author's name. While Sedley chiefly produced light amatory verse and pastoral dialogues in the 1670s, he turned to satirical epigrams in the 1680s and 1690s. His "Epigrams: or, Court Characters" are modelled on the works of Martial. In his epigram "To Nysus", for example, Sedley describes the function of satire
Amelia (novel) work again by bringing the novel before the imaginary "Court of Censorial Enquiry", in which the prosecutors are Hill and the other critics and it is they, not "Amelia" that are truly put on trial. Fielding's rival, Samuel Richardson, declared in February 1752 that the novel "is as dead as if it had been published forty years ago, as to sale." Previously, he attacked the "lowness" of the novel and claimed that "his brawls, his jarrs, his gaols, his spunging-houses, are all drawn from what he has seen and known." However, Richardson also claimed to have never read "Amelia" but,