 Because he thinks that “straightforward discursive writing could have little chances of successfully promoting virtue in a modern context,” Shaftesbury presents his own ideas in “a daunting array of formats” (Den Uyl 1998: 276). These formats include: a letter to a friend, a manual for writers, an epistolary novelistic dialogue, a series of “random” reflections delivered without “Regularity and Order” (C 3.8, 3.2), an argumentative inquiry, and a witty essay that eschews “the Gravity of strict Argument” in favor of the “way of Chat” (C 3.97).