_The Unhappy Penitent_ is not a pleasing performance: it is amorous and violent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory was better than her practice. Nevertheless, it seems to have been successful, for the author some time afterwards, speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas, remarks that "the taste is mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, _Love at a Loss_, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. _Love at a Loss_ was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only public section of Catharine Trotter's career was now over, and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of twenty-two, to more elevated studies. When _Love at a Loss_ was published the author had already left town, and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent she now settled at Salisbury, at the house of a physician, Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister. Her growing intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have had something to do with her determination to make this city her home. She formed a very enthusiastic friendship with the Bishop's second lady, who was an active theologian and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess was fascinated by Mrs. Burnet. "I have not met," she writes in 1701, "such perfection in any of our sex." She now visited in the best Wiltshire society. When the famous singer, John Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave a concert at the palace, and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that she rode out after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at Lord Arundell of Wardour's house. She had a great appreciation of the Bishop's "volatile activity." It is now that the name of Locke first occurs in her correspondence, and we gather that she came into some personal contact with him through a member of the Bishop's family--George Burnet of Kemney, in Aberdeenshire--probably a cousin, with whom she now cultivated an ardent intellectual friendship. He left England on a mission which occupied him from the middle of 1701 until 1708, and this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented their acquaintance from ripening into a warmer feeling. The romance and tragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather, it is plain, around this George Burnet, who was a man of brilliant accomplishments and interested, like herself, in philosophical studies.