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Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21802, 6 June 1936, Page 19

* HER GRACE Kitty. Duchess of Qneensberrjr. By Violet Blddnlph. Ivor WlAoiW and Watson Ltd. 289 pp. (15/- act.) Through Whitcomhe and Toblm Ltd. The subject of this biography, great-granddaughter of the famous Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, granddaughter of the also famous first Lord Rochester, married the third Duke of Queensberry. She lived between 1701 and 1777. Her familiars were the greatest personages, in rank and influence and wit, in the country; and it was a great age. She lived close to the springs of its stirring events, and cot wholly as an observer. She was worthy of her time and station. She was beautiful—so beautiful that Pope made a couplet about her which Croker condemned as wanting both in poetry and in delicacy; she was intelligent and strongminded, both; she was quick, bold, decided, and odd. The evidence is plain and abundant; yet Miss Biddulph does not make much of it. Duchess Kitty is not, after all, important. She might become cither the subject of a skilful, compressed essay, or the skilfully placed centre of an expansive picture of the period. But Miss Biddvdph involves herself in detail without fetching up more than a jumble of names and facts, illuminated chiefly by quotation from contemporary poets, letters, and anecdotes. It would be •worse than ungenerous not to say that many of these pages mm amusing. They are. But it Is not the best biography that pro voltes the reader to scramble throeqgh tiie author’s prose in the sure honajof finding better entertainnient introduced pieces. The book » illustrated.