The most distinguished woman in the field of polemics in the first half of the eighteenth century was Catherine Trotter, better known as Mrs. Cockburn. The contemporary recognition accorded Mrs. Cockburn is to-day the most surprising fact about her. Her father was a Scotchman, a commander in the royal navy, and highly thought of by Charles II, but his death at sea in 1683, and many ensuing disastrous business complications, left the family in serious financial difficulties. Mrs. Trotter was, however, nearly related to the Duke of Lauderdale and the Earl of Perth, a fact which secured her social recognition no matter how narrow her circumstances. Catherine, her youngest child, began writing poetry at a very early age. She also early showed unusual mental alertness, for "she both learned to write and made herself mistress of the _French_ language, by her own application and diligence, without any instructor." In Latin and Logic she had some guidance. Logic was so interesting to her that while still young she drew up an abstract of its principles, for her own use. Catherine's first extant poem was a thanksgiving in heroic verse for the recovery of Mr. Bevil Higgons from small-pox. She was then fourteen, but the labored lines have a kind of heavy maturity prophetic of her later verse. In her seventeenth year she entered fully upon her literary career. For thirteen years she devoted herself to study and writing, and if applause from high authorities could justify her serious preoccupation with things of the mind, such justification was hers in full measure. Before she was seventeen her tragedy, _Agnes de Castro_, was acted at Drury Lane. It was by the advice of the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex that she had allowed "this little off-spring of her early muse"[160] to try its fortune in the world, and such success as it had must be attributed largely to the protection of influential patrons. But with or without patrons, whatever Miss Trotter did was sure to win praise. When she wrote a eulogistic poem to Congreve on his _Mourning Bride_, in 1697, he expressed himself as heartily vexed that her lines came too late for publication with his play, and said of her poetical commendation, "It is the first thing, that ever happened to me, upon which I should make it my choice to be vain."