ABSTRACT
'Delicacy' is a frequent term in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is hard to define exactly, because it has an infinite number of subtly differing usages. Modesty, a manifestation of delicacy, was often explicitly thought of as its equivalent. In Garrick's Epilogue to Kelly's False Delicacy, the phrases 'False Modesty' and 'False Delicacy' are pointedly implied to be interchangeable. The difficulty of reconciling delicacy, which restrains the feelings, with sensibility, which indulges them, is in fact only apparent. Another meaning of 'delicacy' is 'tact, tactful considerateness'. This, like other kinds of delicacy, is a quality which persons of sensibility have in great abundance. Delicacy as a physical attribute was also highly commended. A more important qualification is that obviously Kelly was far from being unsympathetic to sentimentalism. His other writings prove it, though Mark Schorer has argued some of these to be more independent of sentimentalism than is False Delicacy.
