seventeenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture. A
very rare play, _The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets_, the
authorship of which has hitherto defied conjecture, was acted at Drury
Lane after Catharine Trotter had been tempted across to Lincoln's Inn
Fields, and is evidently inspired by the intense jealousy which
smouldered between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotter
incited two older ladies to compete with her; these were Mrs.
Delariviere Manley, who was a discarded favourite of Barbara Villiers,
and fat Mrs. Mary Pix, the stage-struck consort of a tailor. These
rather ridiculous women professed themselves followers of Catharine, and
they produced plays of their own not without some success. With her they
formed the trio of Female Wits who were mocked in the lively but, on the
whole, rather disappointing play I have just mentioned, in the course of
which it is spitefully remarked of Calista--who is Miss Trotter--that
she has "made no small struggle in the world to get into print," and is
"now in such a state of wedlock to pen and ink that it will be very
difficult" for her "to get out of it."

In acting _The Female Wits_ Mrs. Temple, who had played the Princess in
_Agnes de Castro_, took the part of Calista, and doubtless, in the
coarse fashion of those days, made up exactly like poor Catharine
Trotter, who was described as "a Lady who pretends to the learned
Languages, and assumes to herself the name of a Critic." This was a
character, however, which she would not have protested against with much
vigour, for she had now quite definitely taken up the position of a
reformer and a pioneer. She posed as the champion of women's
intellectual rights, and she was accepted as representing in active
literary work the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowed
in her remarkable _Serious Proposal to Ladies_ of 1694. We turn again to
_The Female Wits_, and we find Marsilia (Mrs. Manley) describing Calista