Late eighteenth-century England's textual and visual interest in a melancholy literary figure from the works of Laurence Sterne known as "Poor Maria" valorized and stimulated a subject–object relationship that, considered through the lens of cognitive theory, offers insights into both the widespread cultural-historical phenomenon of 'sensibility" and the general nature of empathic response. Paired with the depictions of the character, particularly as popularized through prints, elements of Douglas Watt's wide-ranging 2007 overview of recent cognitive research illuminate late-eighteenth-century empathic response to Maria, responses shaped by a prevailing cultural atmosphere that emphasized fellow feeling, itself a culmination of a century's preoccupation with the role of altruism in human nature.