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Drury Lane, where, in 1701, under the patronage of Lord Halifax--Pope's
"Bufo"--she produced her third tragedy, _The Unhappy Penitent_. The
dedication of this play to Halifax is a long and interesting essay on
the poetry of the age. The author passes Dryden, Otway, Congreve, and
Lee under examination, and finds technical blemishes in them all:--

"The inimitable Shakespeare seems alone secure on every side from
an attack. I speak not here of faults against the rules of poetry,
but against the natural Genius. He had all the images of nature
present to him, studied her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her
various features, for though he has chiefly exerted himself on the
more masculine passions, 'tis as the choice of his judgment, not
the restraint of his genius, and he has given us as a proof he
could be every way equally admirable."

Lady Piers wrote the prologue to _The Unhappy Penitent_ in verses better
turned than might have been expected. She did not stint praise to her
young friend, whom she compares to the rising sun:--

"Like him, bright Maid, Thy great perfections shine
As awful, as resplendent, as divine!...
Minerva and Diana guard your soul!"

_The Unhappy Penitent_ is not a pleasing performance: it is amorous and
violent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory was better than her practice.
Nevertheless, it seems to have been successful, for the author some time
afterwards, speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas,
remarks that "the taste is mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at
Drury Lane her only comedy, _Love at a Loss_, dedicated in most
enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing
of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. _Love at a
Loss_ was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy
which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method
of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The
first and only public section of Catharine Trotter's career was now
over, and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of twenty-two, to
more elevated studies.

When _Love at a Loss_ was published the author had already left town,
and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent she now settled at Salisbury, at
the house of a physician, Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister.
Her growing intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have had
something to