While philosophers rightly hold that virtue is developed through actual practice—by which habits become tendencies, which become instincts, which then become essential nature—literature provides a vicarious practice of virtue. After all, as Fielding explains further into his dedication, “an example is a kind of picture, in which virtue becomes as it were an object of sight,” one that “strikes us with an idea of that loveliness, which Plato asserts there is in her naked charms.”
