eeple in Dorsetshire, 1699) that being
in London, he desired Mr. King, afterwards lord high chancellor, to make
Mrs. Trotter a visit, and a present of books; and when she had owned
herself, he wrote to her a letter of compliment, a copy of which is
inserted in these memoirs.

But while our author continued to shew the world so deep a penetration
into subjects of the most difficult and abstract kind, she was still
incapable of extricating herself from those subtilties and perplexities
of argument, which retained her in the church of Rome. And the sincerity
of her attachment to it, in all its outward severities, obliged her to
so strict an observance of its fasts, as proved extremely injurious to
her health. Upon which Dr. Denton Nicholas, a very ingenious learned
physician of her acquaintance, advised her to abate of those rigours of
abstinence, as insupportable to a constitution naturally infirm.

She returned to the exercise of her dramatic genius in 1703, and having
fixed upon the Revolution of Sweden under Gustavus Erickson (which has
been related in prose with so much force and beauty by the Abbe Vertot)
for the subject of a Tragedy, she sent the first draught of it to Mr.
Congreve, who returned her an answer, which, on account of the just
remarks upon the conduct of the drama, well deserves a place here, did
it not exceed our proposed bounds, and therefore we must refer the
reader to Dr. Birch's account. This Tragedy was acted in 1706, at the
Queen's Theatre in the Hay-Market, and was printed in quarto.

By a letter from Mrs. Trotter to her friend George Burnet of Kemnay in
Scotland, Esq; then at Geneva, dated February 2, 1703-4, it appears that
she then began to entertain more moderate notions of religion, and to
abate of her zeal for the church of Rome. Her charitableness and
latitude of sentiments seems to have increased a-pace, from the farther
examination which she was now probably making into the state of the
controversy between the church of Rome and the Protestants; for in
another letter to Mr. Burnet, of August 8, 1704, she speaks to the
subject of religion, with a spirit of moderation unusual in the
communion of which she still professed herself.

'I wish, (says she) there was no distinction of churches; and then I
doubt not there would be much more real religion, the name and notion of
which I am so sorry to observe confined to the being of some particular
community; and the whole of it, I am afraid,