Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and took up her abode at Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in Surrey, as companion to an invalid, Mrs. De Vere. She probably chose this place on account of the Locke connection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is now much in her correspondence about Damaris, Lady Masham, and others in that circle in which George Burnet himself was intimate. But great changes were imminent. Although her correspondence at this time is copious it is not always very intelligible, and it is very carelessly edited. Her constant interchange of letters with George Burnet leaves the real position between them on many points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that he was dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter that he had left her £100 in his will, and added: "Pray God I might live to give you much more myself." He regrets that he had so easily "pulled himself from her company," and suggests that if she had not left London to settle in Salisbury he would have stayed in England. Years after they had parted we find him begging her to continue writing to him "at least once a week." She, on her part, tells him that he well knows that there is but one person she could ever think of marrying. He seems to have made her want of vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to her, but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that it was her want of a fortune which actuated him most strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her by telling her that he "knows of parties" in the city of Hanover "who might bring him much honour and comfort" were he "not afraid of losing (Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They write to one another with extreme formality, but that proves nothing. A young woman, passionately in love with a man whom she had just accepted as her future husband, was expected, in 1705, to close her letter by describing herself as "Sir, your very humble servant."
If George Burnet hinted of "parties" in Hanover, Catharine Trotter on her side could boast of Mr. Fenn, "a young clergyman of excellent character," who now laid an ardent siege to her heart. Embarrassed by these attentions, she took the bold step of placing the matter before Mr. Cockburn, a still younger clergyman, of even more excellent character. The letter in which she makes this ingenuous declaration as to a father confessor is one of the tenderest examples extant of the "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" form of correspondence. Mr. Cockburn, one of the minor clergy of the Salisbury set, did speak for himself, and George Burnet having at length announced his own projected marriage with a lady of old acquaintance, Catharine Trotter hesitated no longer but accepted the hand of Mr. Cockburn. They were married early in 1708. Thackeray could have created an amusing romance out of the relations of these four people to one another, and in particular it would have been very interesting to see what he would have made of the character of George Burnet.
Catharine Cockburn was now, after so eventful a life of emotional and intellectual experience, still a young woman, not far past her twenty-eighth birthday. She was to survive for more than forty-three years, during which time she was to correspond much, to write persistently, and to publish whenever opportunity offered. But I do not propose to accompany her much further on her blameless career. All through her married life, which was spent at various places far from London, she existed almost like a plant in a Leyden jar. Constant genteel poverty, making it difficult for her to buy books and impossible to travel was supported by her with dignity and patience, but it dwarfed her powers. Her later writings, on philosophy, on morality, on the principles of the Christian religion, are so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one's eyes. She who had sparkled as a girl with Congreve and exchanged polite amenities with Locke lived on to see modern criticism begin with Samuel Johnson and the modern novel start with Samuel Richardson, but without observing that any change had come into the world of letters. 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.
TWO PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM:
JOSEPH AND THOMAS WARTON[4]
The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature have been examined so closely and so often that it might be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted. But no subject of any importance in literature is ever exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with your permission, to present to you a familiar phase of the literary life of the eighteenth century from a fresh point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of a Warton Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly what it is which a lecturer proposes to himself to achieve during the brief hour in which you indulge him with your attention; it certainly makes his task the easier if he does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in poetry, as it existed up to the period of their childhood, which was stimulating to the Wartons, and what they disapproved of in the verse which was fashionable and popular among the best readers in their day.