When commenting on Frances Greville’s ‘Prayer for Indifference’, Jerome McGann identifies a central element in the poetics of sensibility: ‘Nothing is more characteristic of the poetry of sensibility than its dialectical relation to “indifference”’. He goes on to argue that ‘The relation between the two, in the discourse of sensibility functions as a reciprocity and not an antithesis’. 1 In this statement, McGann describes a necessary relation between indifference and sensibility: indifference requires sensibility to prove that it feels; sensibility requires indifference to allow it to sustain itself. Each requires and validates the other. McGann’s definition of this ‘central element in the poetics of sensibility’ provides a useful instrument for approaching such eighteenth-century practitioners as Greville who juxtaposes the ‘nymph Indifference’ from the ‘treacherous sense / ... Which pleasure can to pain refine, / To pain new pangs impart’. 2