id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-6917		Sentimentality - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	2415	331	58	In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party".[8] What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession[9]—part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level.[10] Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, "lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart".[11] Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation;[12] and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno"[13] and the Stoics.	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-6917.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-6917.txt