to Mrs. Wellfed (Mrs. Fix) as "the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing!
She pretends to grammar! writes in mood and figure! does everything
methodically!" Yet when Calista appears on the stage, Mrs. Manley rushes
across to fling her arms around her and to murmur: "O charmingest Nymph
of all Apollo's Train, let me embrace thee!" Later on Calista says to
Mrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, "I cannot but remind you, Madam ... I read
Aristotle in his own language"; and of a certain tirade in a play of Ben
Jonson she insists: "I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into
Latin." Mrs. Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she "can
go no further than the eight parts of speech." This brings down upon her
an icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say
... you impose upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness of
manner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air of
priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in that
loose theatre of William III.

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to the
Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of ill
Nature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think their
peculiar Prerogative"--that is, intellectual distinction. Catharine
Trotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced her
tragedy of _Fatal Friendship_, the published copy of which (1698) is all
begarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a
succession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told that
she had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched the
stage." This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raised
by Jeremy Collier in his famous _Short View of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the Stage_, in which all the dramatists of the day were
violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the
courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling