with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women.

"You as your Sex's champion art come forth
To fight their quarrel and assert their worth,"

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:--

"You stand the first of stage-reformers too."

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and at
vindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel."

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career of our
bluestocking. _Fatal Friendship_ enjoyed a success which Catharine
Trotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only one
which has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremely
sentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries
said that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in
company with Congreve and Granville "the polite," who had written a
_She-Gallants_, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish her
plays to be. _Fatal Friendship_ has an ingenious plot, in which the
question of money takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost
every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. Felicia,
sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain her), is wooed by the
wealthy Roquelaure, although she is secretly married to Gramont, who is
also too poor to support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will make
love to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades him--in
order that his best friend, Castalio, may be released from a debtor's
prison--bigamously to many Lamira, a wealthy widow. But Castalio is in
love with Lamira, and is driven to frenzy by Gramont's illegal marriage.