several others" all liked the verses and said
they were better than any other which had been written on the subject.
George Burnet, who saw the Duke in Germany, reported him highly pleased
with her--"the wisest virgin I ever knew," he writes. She now hoped,
with the Duke's protection, to recover her father's fortune and be no
longer a burden to her brother-in-law. A pension of L20 from Queen Anne
gave her mother now a shadow of independence, but Catharine herself was
wholly disappointed at that "settlement for my life" which she was
ardently hoping for. I think that, if she had secured it, George Burnet
would have come back from Germany to marry her. Instead of that he sent
her learned messages from Bayle and from Leibnitz, who calls her "une
Demoiselle fort spirituelle."

Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and took up her abode
at Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in Surrey, as companion to an invalid,
Mrs. De Vere. She probably chose this place on account of the Locke
connection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is now much in
her correspondence about Damaris, Lady Masham, and others in that circle
in which George Burnet himself was intimate. But great changes were
imminent. Although her correspondence at this time is copious it is not
always very intelligible, and it is very carelessly edited. Her constant
interchange of letters with George Burnet leaves the real position
between them on many points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that he
was dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter that he had left her
L100 in his will, and added: "Pray God I might live to give you much
more myself." He regrets that he had so easily "pulled himself from her
company," and suggests that if she had not left London to settle in
Salisbury he would have stayed in England. Years after they had parted
we find him begging her to continue writing to him "at least once a
week." She, on her part, tells him that he well knows that there is but
one person she could ever think of marrying. He seems to have made her
want of vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to her,
but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that it was her want of a
fortune which actuated him most strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her
by telling her that he "knows of parties" in the city of Hanover "who
might bring him much honour and comfort" were he "not afraid of losing
(Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They write to o