Her husband, owing to his having fallen "into
a scruple about the oath of abjuration," lost his curacy and "was
reduced to great difficulties in the support of his family."
Nevertheless--a perfect gentleman at heart--he "always prayed for the
King and Royal family by name." Meanwhile, to uplift his spirits in this
dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the
Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He reminds
us of Dr. Primrose in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and, like him, Mr.
Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine.

So little mark did poor Mrs. Cockburn make on her younger contemporaries
that she disappeared forthwith from literary history. Her works,
especially her plays, have become so excessively rare as to be almost
unprocurable. The brief narrative of her life and her activities which I
have taken the liberty of presenting to-day would be hopelessly engulfed
in obscurity, and we should know as little of Catharine Trotter as we do
of Mary Pix, and Delariviere Manley, and many late seventeenth-century
authors more eminent than they, had it not been that in 1751, two years
after her death, all her papers were placed in the hands of an ingenious
clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Birch, who printed them for subscribers
in two thick and singularly unpleasing volumes. This private edition was
never reissued, and is now itself a rare book. It is the sort of book
that for two hundred and fifty years must fatally have been destroyed as
lumber whenever an old country mansion that contained it has been
cleared out.

During all that time no one, so far as I can discover, has evinced the
smallest interest in Catharine Trotter. We gain an idea of the blackness
of her obscurity when we say that even Mr. Austin Dobson appears to have
never heard of her. The champion of Locke and Clarke, the correspondent
of Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar,
she seems to have slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold on
time. But I hope her thin little lady-like ghost, still hovering in a
phantom-like transparence round the recognised seats of learning, will
be a little comforted at last by the polite attention of a few of my
readers.

[Footnote 2: Around the story of Agnes de Castro there gathered a whole
literature of fiction, which Mr. Montague Summers has investigated in
his _Works of Aphra Behn_, Vol. V. pp. 211-212.]

[Footnote 3: Pr