Definition of "virtue" []

• Moral excellence and righteousness; goodness. (noun)
• An example or kind of moral excellence: the virtue of patience. (noun)
• Chastity, especially in a woman. (noun)
• A particularly efficacious, good, or beneficial quality; advantage: a plan with the virtue of being practical. (noun)
• Effective force or power: believed in the virtue of prayer. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "But then his trousers were always rolled up at the knee, for the convenience of wading on the slightest notice; and his virtue, supposing it to exist, was undeniably “virtue in rags, ” which, on the authority even of bilious philosophers, who think all well-dressed merit overpaid, is notoriously likely to remain unrecognized (perhaps because it is seen so seldom)."
• "The habit of virtue creates for him no wants but those which virtue itself suffices to satisfy; it is thus that _virtue is always its own peculiar reward_, that it remunerates itself with all the advantages which it incessantly procures for others."
• "V. ii.348 (448,5) [The virtue of your eye must break my oath] I believe the author means that the _virtue, _ in which word _goodness_ and _power_ are both comprised, _must dissolve_ the obligation of the oath."