Mrs. Catherine Cockburn, 1679–1749, was a native of London, a daughter of Captain David Trotter, R.N. In her 17th year her tragedy of “Agnes de Castro” was produced with great success at the Theatre Royal. In 1698 she gave to the world the “Tragedy of Fatal Friendship,” and in 1701, “The Unhappy Penitent.” In the same year she contributed, with several other ladies, to the Nine Muses; a tribute to the memory of John Dryden. In 1706 her tragedy entitled “The Revolution of Sweden” was acted at the Queen’s Theatre. In 1708 she was married to the Rev. Mr. Cockburn, who was subsequently presented to the living of Long-Horsley, Northumberland. In the previous year she returned to the communion of the Church of England, which she had when quite young forsaken for the Church of Rome. In 1726 she pub. a letter to Dr. Holdsworth in vindication of Mr. Locke’s Essay respecting the resurrection of the body. In 1747 appeared her “Remarks upon the Principles and Reasonings of Dr. Rutherforth’s Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue.” In 1751 Dr. Birch pub. an edition of Mrs. Cockburn’s Works in 2 vols. 8vo. This collection, however, contains none of her dramatic pieces excepting “The Fatal Friendship.”
Personal
Mrs. Cockburn was no less celebrated for her beauty, in her younger days, than for her genius and accomplishments. She was indeed small of stature, but had a remarkable liveliness in her eye, and delicacy of complexion, which continued to her death. Her private character rendered her extremely amiable to those who intimately knew her. Her conversation was always innocent, useful and agreeable, without the least affectation of being thought a wit, and attended with a remarkable modesty and diffidence of herself, and a constant endeavour to adapt her discourse to her company. She was happy in an uncommon evenness and cheerfulness of temper. Her disposition was generous and benevolent; and ready upon all occasions to forgive injuries, and bear them, as well as misfortunes, without interrupting her own ease, or that of others, with complaints or reproaches. The pressures of a very contracted fortune were supported by her with calmness and in silence, nor did she ever attempt to improve it among those great personages to whom she was known, by importunities; to which the best minds are most averse, and which her approved merit and established reputation should have rendered unnecessary.
General
Posterity, at least, will be so solicitous to know, to whom they will owe the most demonstrative and perspicuous reasonings, upon subjects of eternal importance; and her own sex is entitled to the fullest information about one, who has done such honour to them, and raised our ideas of their intellectual powers, by an example of the greatest extent of understanding and correctness of judgment, united to all the vivacity of imagination. Antiquity, indeed, boasted of its Female Philosophers, whose merits have been drawn forth in an elaborate treatise of Menage.
| But say what matron now walks musing forth | |
| From the bleak mountains of her native north? | |
| While round her brows two sisters of the Nine | |
| Poetic wreaths with philosophic twine! | |
| Hail, Cockburn, hail! even now from reason’s bowers | |
| Thy Locke delighted culls the choicest flowers | |
| To deck his great, successful champion’s head, | |
| And Clarke expects thee in the laurel shade. | |
| Though long to dark oblivious wants a prey, | |
| Thy aged worth passed unperceived away, | |
| Yet Scotland now shall ever boast thy fame, | |
| While England mourns thy undistinguished name, | |
| And views with wonder, in a female mind, | |
| Philosopher, divine, and poet joined. |
Her poetry has a compression of thought and an ease of style which greatly distinguished it from the verse of most female writers in her time.
Although much has been said and written about Locke by the ablest metaphysicians of his age, and of each succeeding generation, it may be questioned whether his own words has ever been more truly construed than by Mrs. Cockburn. What she wrote concerning his opinions during his life was approved by Locke himself; what she wrote of them after his decease was acknowledged to be correct by his most intimate associates, to whom he had frequently and familiarly expounded them.
Mrs. Cockburn was a clever woman, and kept no dull household, though she there wrote a defence of Locke, while her reverend husband was perusing an account of the Mosaic deluge. As a metaphysical and controversial writer, she gathered laurels and abuse in her day, for the latter of which she found compensation in the friendship and admiration of Warburton. She was a valiant woman, too; one, whom asthma and the ills of life could not deter from labor. But death relieved her from all these, in 1749; and she is remembered in the history of literature as a good and well-accomplished woman; the very opposite of Mrs. Behn and all her heroines.
