an icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say ... you impose upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness of manner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air of priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in that loose theatre of William III. Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to the Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of ill Nature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think their peculiar Prerogative"--that is, intellectual distinction. Catharine Trotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced her tragedy of _Fatal Friendship_, the published copy of which (1698) is all begarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a succession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told that she had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched the stage." This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in his famous _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage_, in which all the dramatists of the day were violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women. "You as your Sex's champion art come forth To fight their quarrel and assert their worth," one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:-- "You stand the first of stage-reformers too." The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and at vindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel."