abstract" of that science "for her own use." Thus she prepared for her
future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. When she was very small,
in spite of frequent conferences with learned members of the Church of
England, she became persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the
Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coincided with the
conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor Perth, but as events turned
out it cannot but have added to the sorrows of that much-tried woman,
her mother. (It should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglican
faith when she was twenty-eight years of age.)

She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of James II. came to a
close. Mrs. Trotter's connections were now in a poor plight. The new
Earl of Lauderdale was in great distress for money; Lord Dartmouth,
abandoned by the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where he
died on October 25th, 1691, in which year the estates of the Earl of
Perth were sequestered and he himself hunted out of the country. Ruin
simultaneously fell on all the fine friends of our infant prodigy, and
we can but guess how it affected her. Yet there were plenty of other
Jacobites left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance shows
that she cultivated their friendship. She published in 1693 a copy of
verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery
from the smallpox; she was then fourteen years of age. Higgons was a
young man of twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled court
in France, where he had distinguished himself by his agreeable manners,
and who had just made a name for himself by poems addressed to Dryden
and by a prologue to Congreve's _Old Batchelor_. He was afterwards to
become famous for a little while as a political historian. Catharine
Trotter's verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as "lovely youth,"
and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms which are almost
boisterous. This poem was not only her introduction to the public, but,