do with her determination to make this city her home. She
formed a very enthusiastic friendship with the Bishop's second lady, who
was an active theologian and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess was
fascinated by Mrs. Burnet. "I have not met," she writes in 1701, "such
perfection in any of our sex." She now visited in the best Wiltshire
society. When the famous singer, John Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave a
concert at the palace, and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that she
rode out after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at Lord
Arundell of Wardour's house. She had a great appreciation of the
Bishop's "volatile activity." It is now that the name of Locke first
occurs in her correspondence, and we gather that she came into some
personal contact with him through a member of the Bishop's
family--George Burnet of Kemney, in Aberdeenshire--probably a cousin,
with whom she now cultivated an ardent intellectual friendship. He left
England on a mission which occupied him from the middle of 1701 until
1708, and this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented their
acquaintance from ripening into a warmer feeling. The romance and
tragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather, it is plain, around this
George Burnet, who was a man of brilliant accomplishments and
interested, like herself, in philosophical studies.

These, it would appear, Catharine Trotter had never abandoned, but she
applied herself to them closely at Salisbury, where she made some
superior acquaintances. One of these was John Norris of Bemerton, whose
_Theory of an Ideal and Intelligible World_ had just made some
sensation. By the intermediary of George Burnet she came in touch with
some of the leading French writers of the moment, such as Malebranche
and Madame Dacier. There is a French poet, unnamed, who understands
English, but he is gone to Rome before he can be made to read _The Fatal
Friendship_. Meanwhile, Catharine Trotter's obsession with the ideas of
Locke was giving some anxiety to her friends. That philosopher had
published his famous _Essay on the Human Understanding_ in 1690, and it
had taken several years for the opposition to his views, and in
particular to his theological toleration, to take effect. But in 1697
there were made a number of almost simultaneous attacks on Locke's
position. The circle at Salisbury was involved in them, for one of these
was written by Norris of Bemerton, and another is attributed to a member
of the