To analyse the grounds for a chorus of praise ranging from the 'young ladies' of the eighteenth century to the utterances of distinguished critics, and popular authors of our own day, would be to confound literary criticism with biography. But there are some points appertaining to Fielding's great novel which cannot be here disregarded, in that they closely affect his personal character. Such are the light in which he himself regarded his masterpiece, the intention with which he wrote it, and the means which he selected to carry that intention into effect. All these he himself very plainly sets forth in his _Dedication_ to Lyttelton and in other passages of _Tom Jones_. As to his intention. "I declare," he says, in the _Dedication_, "that to recommend Goodness and Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History." And the means selected for this end, and for the companion object of persuading men from guilt, are as clearly stated. First as we have seen, Fielding plays the part of pure idealist, purposing to create a picture "in which virtue becomes as it were an object of sight." For such pictures we have but to think of Sophia Western, and of that final page of _Tom Jones_, than which no more charming representation of mutual affection, esteem, and well doing can be imagined. But besides this means of reaching his audience Fielding adopted, he tells us, a second method. He argues that no acquisitions of guilt can compensate a man for the loss of inward peace, for the attendant horror, anxiety, and danger, to which he subjects himself; thus endeavouring to enlist man's self-interest no less than his admiration, on the side of virtue. Again, he explains yet another method by which he essays to foil the progress of evil, viz. to show that virtue and innocence are chiefly betrayed "into the snares that deceit and villainy spread for them" by indiscretion; a moral which he has "the more industriously laboured ... since I believe it is much easier to make good Men, wise than to make bad Men good." For this purpose, he concludes, namely to show, as in a figure, the beauty of virtue, to persuade men that in following innocence and virtue they follow their own obvious interests, to arm them from the snares of villainy and deceit, "I have employed all the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the following History; wherein I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out of their favourite Follies and Vices."