But this refined jargon, which has infested letters and tainted morals, is chiefly admired and adopted by young ladies of a certain turn, who read sentimental books, write sentimental letters, and contract sentimental friendships. Now, I conceive them to be extremely different.
Sentiment is the virtue of ideas, and principle the virtue of action.
Thus, More's critique of sentimentalism takes a similar position to Mackenzie's attack on the sentimental novel. And enthusiasm is so far from being disagreeable, that a portion of it is perhaps necessary in an engaging woman. But it must be the enthusiasm of the heart, not of the senses. I will even go so far as to assert, that a young woman cannot have any real greatness of soul, or the true elevation of principle, if she has not a tincture of what the vulgar would call Romance, but which persons of a certain way of thinking will discern to proceed from those fine feelings, and that charming sensibility, without which, though a woman may be worthy, yet she can never be amiable. More here works to establish as an indispensable element of character a specifically female version of sensibility.