Horace was "a silly tragedy." In this
opinion it was evident that Evelyn did not
coincide, for he afterwards cited Orinda
"as among the most illustrious persons of
our nation," and his wife, good Mrs.
Evelyn, in contrasting her talents and
character with those of the Duchess of
Newcastle, to whom she had lately been
introduced, gives Orinda the palm. "The
duchess is an original. I hope she may
never have a copy. Never did I see a
woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain
and ambitious. What contrary miracles
does our age produce! This lady, and Mrs.
Katherine Phillips."  The poems of "the
matchless Orinda" were circulated in
manuscript among her friends, and some
speculative and dishonest bookseller, having
contrived to procure copies of them, published
them without her knowledge. The law of
copyright was neither very clear nor very
stringent in those days (Shakespeare's
sonnets were printed without his consent),
and instead of suing the printer or the
publisher for this breach of the eighth
commandment, Mrs. Phillips was driven to the
necessity of publishing her poems herself.
She wrote to a friend, whom, in the fashionable
affectation of the day, she addressed as
"Poliarchus," from some place in Wales,
where she resided, setting forth the annoyance
that this surreptitious publication had
caused her. "Is there," she querulously
asked, "no retreat from the malice of
this world? I thought a rock and a
mountain might have hidden me, and
that it had been free for all to spend their
solitudes in what reserves they pleased,
and that our rivers, though they are
babbling, would not have betrayed the
follies of impertinent thoughts upon their
banks; but 'tis only I who am that
unfortunate person that cannot so much as think
in private, but must have my imagination
rifled, and exposed to play the mountebank,
and dance upon the ropes to entertain all
the rabble; to undergo all the raillery of
the wits and all the severity of the wise,
and to be the sport of some, and of some
that can't read a verse. This is a most cruel
accident, and hath made so proportionate
an impression upon me, that really it hath
cost me a sharp fit of sickness since I heard
it."

Her friend Poliarchus contrived to stop
the sale of the piratical book, and undertook
to bring out a correct edition; but the
lady died of small-pox before the work
appeared, to the great sorrow of all the wits
and fine ladies of the court. "The small-
pox," says Poliarchus, in his introductory
essay,  "that malicious disease, as knowing
how little she would have been concerned
for her handsomeness, when at the best,
was not satisfied to be as injurious a printer
of her face, as the other had been of her
poems, but treated her with a more fatal
cruelty than her stationer had treated them;
for though he, to her most sensible affliction,
surreptitiously possessed himself of a false
copy, and sent those children of her fancy
into the world so martyred that they were
more unlike themselves than she could have
been made had she escaped; that murderous
tyrant (the small-pox), with greater
barbarity, seized unexpectedly upon her,
the true original, and to the much juster
affliction of all the world violently tore
her out of it, and hurried her untimely
to the grave, upon the 22nd of June,
1664, she being then but thirty-one years
of age."

Poliarchus mentions to  her praise, as
something unusual in a lady, that her
handwriting was good and her spelling correct.
"She wrote familiar letters with strange
readiness and facility, in a very fair hand
and with perfect orthography. We might
well have called her the English Sappho,
she of all the female poets of former ages
being for her verses and her virtues both
the most highly valued. But she has called
herself Orinda, a name that deserves to be
added to the number of the Muses, and to
live as long as they! Her merit should
have had a statue of porphyry, wrought by
some great artist equal in skill to Michael
Angelo, that might have transferred to
posterity the lasting image of so great a
person!"

Cowley was as complimentary in verse
as Poliarchus was in prose, and in an elegy
on her death, after rating the small-pox in
round terms for its cruelty and spite in
attacking so beautiful, witty, and inspired
a person, he raised her high above all the
poets and poetesses of her time—himself
alone excepted:

The certain proofs of our Orinda's wit
In her own lasting characters are writ,
And they will long my praise of them survive,
Tho' long, perhaps, too that may live!
The trade of glory managed by the pen,
Tho' great it be, and everywhere is found,
Does bring in but small profit to us men;
'Tis by the number of the sharers drown'd;
Orinda, on the female coasts of Fame,
Engrosses all the goods of her poetic name;
She does no partner with her see,
Does all the business there alone, which we
Are forced to carry on by a whole company.

The phrase, "the female coasts of Fame,"