To paint the Looks or Thoughts of either of these Lovers is beyond my Power. And the Misfortune is, that few of my Readers have been enough in Love, to feel by their own Hearts what past at this Time in theirs.

The narrator speaks these words in Chapter XI of Book XIII, when he describes the chance meeting between Tom Jones and Sophia in Lady Bellaston's drawing-room. The narrator's feigned modesty when he claims that he cannot find the words to express this moving scene, as well as his coy, ironic remark that he does not suppose his readers to ever have been in love, work together to create Fielding's unique stamp of "artifice." He constantly draws his reader's attention to his act of creation in the hopes that his reader will follow his lead and become a perceptive, analytical reader. Indeed, the relationship between the narrator and reader is one of the most important of the novel.