squeaks. It is, in fact, all humbug, just as sentiment is often
all truth.

Therefore, to find an interesting phase of human folly, we may
look back to the years which lie between 1756 and 1793 as the era
of sensibility. The great prophets of this false god, or goddess,
were Rousseau in France and Goethe with Schiller in Germany,
together with a host of midgets who shook and shivered in
imitation of their masters. It is not for us to catalogue these
persons. Some of them were great figures in literature and
philosophy, and strong enough to shake aside the silliness of
sensibility; but others, while they professed to be great as
writers or philosophers, are now remembered only because their
devotion to sensibility made them conspicuous in their own time.
They dabbled in one thing and another; they "cribbed" from every
popular writer of the day. The only thing that actually belonged
to them was a high degree of sensibility.

And what, one may ask, was this precious thing--this sensibility?

It was really a sort of St. Vitus's dance of the mind, and almost
of the body. When two persons, in any way interested in each
other, were brought into the same room, one of them appeared to be
seized with a rotary movement. The voice rose to a higher pitch
than usual, and assumed a tremolo. Then, if the other person was
also endowed with sensibility, he or she would rotate and quake in
somewhat the same manner. Their cups of tea would be considerably
agitated. They would move about in as unnatural a manner as
possible; and when they left the room, they would do so with
gaspings and much waste of breath.