Uncle Tom’s Cabin vocabulary

I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed.

Herman Melville. Moby Dick

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The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu, wherein her soul delighted.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin

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To give them their due, they soar a step higher than their predecessors, and may be called men of wisdom and vertù (take heed you do not read virtue).

Henry Fielding. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

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"here are paintings from the Greeks to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to the present hour. Many are chosen, as you see, with little deference to the opinions of Virtu.

Edgar Allan Poe. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2