AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FIGURE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 133, 29 February 1936, Page 21

AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FIGURE

“Kittv, Duchess of Queensberry,” by Violet Biddulph (London: . Ivor Nicholson and Watson).

The art of biography has attained such a high standard that any work of this nature must needs run the gauntlet of comparison with many brilliant studies of the lives of men and women of historical significance. “Kitty, Duchess of Queensberry” suffers by comparison with most of the biographical works which have appeared recently. The writer has collected much valuable information and has done much research among published and unpublished letters of the period, but her subjects never really come to light. They remain dead and buried in the many layers of stiff, unyielding, unrevealing garments with which the aristocracy of the period was wont to clothe body and mind. For the first fifty pages the reader wanders discouraged and apparently forgotten by the author, through forests of genealogical trees, meeting hundreds of titled personages, but making the acquaintance of none. Then, at last Catherine Queensberry becomes more than a name. The reader finds she was beautiful Catherine Hyde, born ju 1701, and later married to Charles JL Duke of Queensberry, from all accounts a lovable and long-suffering gentleman. Catherine Hyde is described as eccentric, unconventional, capricious, yet no examples of her conduct are forthcoming until the literary lights of the period have been paraded. The Duchess of Queensberry was not well educated, and, with the exception of John Gay, took little interest in the writers of the time, though she apparently bad made the acquaintance of most. But their introduction in the life of Catherine Hyde seems scarcely justified. The Duke of Queensberry, however, was the patron of John G,ty ! during, the latter years of his life, and Gay resided in the Queensberry household. He gained the warm friendship of the Duchess, and the account of his life is one of the enduring portions of the book.

The Duchess of Queensberry had two sons, to whom she was devoted, yet almost no mention is made of them for nearly two hundred pages. This doos not seem to be from lack of Information about them, for Kilty Queensberry mentioned her children frequently in letters Io her intimate friends. It appears to have been part of the author’s mode of treating her subject to keep the children in their proper place—a chapter to themselves—but it doos not aid in bringing the characters to life. , „ “Kittv, Duchess of Queensbcny gives an authoritative picture of the eighteenth century, but. it has the stiff formality of an old engraving. It is a pity, for it would appear from all the faithfully recorded anecdote about the Duchess that she was nothing if not vital.