_Fatal Friendship_ was played at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre, and no doubt it was Congreve who brought Miss Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warm friendship for her had unquestionably a great deal to do with her success and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in which the great dramatist acknowledges, in 1697, the congratulations of his young admirer, and it breathes an eager cordiality. Congreve requested Betterton to present him to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality for her company is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of _The Female Wits_ insinuates that Congreve made the looking-over of Catharine's scenes "his pretence for daily visits." Another satirist, in 1698, describes Congreve sitting very gravely with his hat over his eyes, "together with the two she-things called Poetesses which write for his house," half-hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar, too, seeing the celebrated writer of _Fatal Friendship_ in the theatre on the third night of the performance of his _Love and a Bottle_, had "his passions wrought so high" by a sight of the beautiful author that he wrote her a letter in which he called her "one of the fairest of the sex, and the best judge." If Catharine Trotter, as the cynosure of delicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through _Love and a Bottle_ without a blush, even _her_ standard of decency was not very exacting. But in all this rough, coarse world of wit her reputation never suffered a rebuff. Encouraged by so much public and private attention, our young dramatist continued to work with energy and conscientiousness. But her efforts were forestalled by an event, or rather a condition of the national temper, of which too little notice has been taken by literary historians. The attacks on the stage for its indecency and blasphemy had been flippantly met by the theatrical agents, but they had sunk deeply into the conscience of the people. There followed with alarming abruptness a general public repulsion against the playhouses, and to this, early in 1699, a roughly worded Royal Proclamation gave voice. During the whole of that year the stage was almost in abeyance, and even Congreve, with _The Way of the World_, was unable to woo his audience back to Lincoln's Inn. During this time of depression Catharine Trotter composed at least two tragedies, which she was unable to get performed, while the retirement of Congreve in a paroxysm of annoyance must have been a very serious disadvantage to her.