RS Cockburn, whose maiden name was Trotter, the daughter of a commander in the navy, was in youth said to have been distinguished by personal attractions. Her father died when she was very young; and her mother, who was nearly related to more than one Scotch noble family, was left in very narrow circumstances. Catherine began to show remarkable talent or vivacity of mind at a very early age. It is told that, while she was still a mere child, she one day surprised a company of her friends by some extemporaneous verses on an incident which had just happened in the street. Her first literary attempts were in verse. One poem, which she is stated to have written when she was only fourteen, is printed among her works. It is certain that in 1695, when she was only in her seventeenth year, she appeared as a dramatic writer,—a tragedy written by her, entitled "Agnes de Castro," having been brought out with success at the Theatre Royal in that year, and printed the following. This was followed by a second tragedy, entitled "Fatal Friendship," which was performed in the new theatre, Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1698, and printed the same year; and then came another tragedy and a comedy.
These juvenile productions had, probably all of them, great defects; but the authoress of three tragedies and a comedy, all both printed and acted before she had reached the age of twenty-two, was at any rate no common phenomenon. And she had also, it seems, already been long a diligent student of metaphysics, besides having, while as we gather only in her teens, ventured so far into the maze of theological speculation and controversy, as to have been induced to leave the Church of England in which she had been educated, and to profess herself a Roman Catholic. The first fruit of her philosophical studies appeared in May 1702, when she published anonymously a defence of "Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding," in reply to an attack upon it, which was afterwards known to have proceeded from the learned and eloquent Dr Thomas Burnet of the Charter House.
About the beginning of 1707 she returned to the Church of England, having previously changed her name for another. Mr Cockburn is said to have been a man of learning and talent, but he never was fortunate in obtaining much preferment; and throughout the remainder of his life she had both the cares of a family to occupy her time and thoughts, and very straitened circumstances to struggle with. In 1726 he became minister of an episcopal congregation at Aberdeen. Her return to England seems to have been like the recommencement of existence to her, or the awakening from a state of torpor. In the last stage of her life, notwithstanding broken health and some sharp sorrow, her intellectual and literary activity emulated what she had displayed at the outset of her career. In 1739 she boldly set out upon what we may call a voyage round the world of metaphysics, in "Remarks upon some Writers in the Controversy concerning the Foundation of Moral Duty and Moral Obligation; particularly the Translator of Archbishop King's Origin of Moral Evil [Dr Edmund Law, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle], and the Author of Divine Legation of Moses [Warburton]; to which are prefixed some Cursory Thoughts on the Controversies concerning Necessary Existence, the Reality and Infinity of Space, the Extension and Place of Spirits, and on Dr Watt's Notion of Substance." It was not printed till the year 1743, when it was given to the world, without the name of the author, in "The History of the Works of the Learned."
Mrs Cockburn here adopted Dr Clarke's theory of the foundations of morality, namely, that the distinctions between virtue and vice are not created by the declarations or even by the will of the Deity, but arise out of eternal and immutable relations and essential differences of things. Not long after, her strength was much worn down by frequent attacks of asthma, to which she had been subject for many years. "I have," she says, "very little prospect of tolerable health for any continuance. My cough returned at the beginning of September, and held me about two months, but is now succeeded by such a difficulty of breathing that I do not know which is most grievous; but between them I am reduced to great weakness." Yet she was at this time engaged upon a new metaphysical work, which proved to be the most elaborate and able of all her literary performances, her "Remarks upon the Principles and Reasonings of Dr Rutherford's Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue, in Vindication of the Contrary Principles and Reasonings Enforced in the Writings of Dr Samuel Clarke." The Rev. Dr Thomas Rutherford, whose essay appeared in 1744, had therein maintained the doctrine that the test and essence of virtue was its tendency to promote the good properly understood, whether of the agent or others; in other words, was utility in the largest sense. When her tract was finished, Mrs Cockburn sent it to Warburton, whose theory on the subject of it was different both from Rutherford's and her own, and against whose views one of her previous works, as we have seen, had been in part directed. Warburton held that the distinction between virtue and vice was constituted by the arbitrary will of the Deity. Notwithstanding this difference of opinion, however, he not only admitted the merit of the present work in the frankest and most cordial terms, styling it, in a letter to the authoress, the strongest and clearest piece of metaphysics that ever was written, but took upon himself the charge of finding a publisher for it; and when it appeared in 1747, it was introduced by a preface from the pen of Warburton, in which he almost reiterated those strong expressions, declaring it to contain "all the clearness of expression, the strength of reason, the precision of logic and attachment to truth which makes books of this nature really useful to the common cause of virtue and religion."
This work appears to have attracted much more notice than anything that Mrs Cockburn had previously done. She was subsequently induced by the advice of her friends to set about the preparation of a complete collection of her writings, with the view of publishing it by subscription. But this task she did not live to see accomplished. At last, in January 1749, she lost her husband, who appears to have been about a year older than herself; and this stroke probably shortened her own existence, which terminated on the 11th of May of the same year.
ELIZABETH BERKELEIGH.
[BORN 1750. DIED 1828.]
TEMPLE BAR.
HE youngest daughter of Augustus, fourth Earl of Berkeleigh, born in 1750, came into the world two months ere by the laws of nature she was to be looked for; and this circumstance, which was a fit prelude to an eccentric life, had nearly led to an abrupt termination of the infant's earthly career ere its sands of life had run through the boiling of an egg. A certain ceremonial was observed in those days when ladies of a certain rank swelled the rolls of the aristocracy; and the first person who approached the bed of the noble accouchée was the Countess of Albemarle, her aunt. The infant which had so unexpectedly claimed its share of the world had doubly disappointed its mother; first, by being a girl, when a boy had been predicted with assurance, for Lady Berkeleigh had previously had four girls in succession, three of them, singularly enough, at one birth; next, the little being, so far from exhibiting any signs of the future beauty, presented the most miserable half-alive aspect imaginable; and there being nothing ready to receive it, a piece of flannel was huddled round it, and it was left on an arm-chair in a kind of despair, and for some minutes altogether unheeded, till the visitor already named was on the point of sitting down on foresaid arm-chair, and, but for the screams of the attendants, would have driven out, once and for ever, the small instalment of life-breath the forlorn babe had been strenuously endeavouring to suck in.