Green cloth binding with gilt title and decoration on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. 

A collection of illustrations and biographical details of beautiful women from the seventeenth century. Inspired by “The Fair Women Exhibition”, this work holds a collection of beautiful women from the seventeenth century with illustrations and biographical details. The women include: The Duchess of Somerset, Lucy Walter, Nell Gwyn and the Countess of Shrewsbury. 

Written by Allan Fea, a British historian, specialising in the English Civil Wars period and the House of Stuart. Pages are bright and clean with minor age toning. Contemporary ink inscription to the front. Very Good. book.

Excerpt: …wives than the two Marys could not be pointed out. A somewhat blase, cold, and cynical man of forty was scarcely an ideal husband for so young and beautiful a wife as Mary D’Este. ” She was,” says Peterborough, ” tall, and admirably shaped; her complexion was of the last degree of fairness, her hair black as jet; so were her eyebrows and her eyes, but the latter so full of light and sweetness, as they did dazzle and charm too. There seemed given unto them by nature, sovereign 1 MS. Diary of Dr. Edward Lake. power–power to kill, and power to save; and in the whole turn of her face which was of the most graceful oval, there were all the features, all the beauty, and all that could be great and charming in any human creature.”x Lady Vaughan says she had more wit and as much beauty as ever woman had before.2 Naturally cheerful, good natured and obliging, the new Duchess soon became a favourite, and her youthful freshness and enthusiasm gave new zest to the amusements at Court. The novelty and gaiety at Whitehall suited her natural vivacity, and she entered heart and soul into the prevalent fashion of donning disguises and going incognito to Bartholomew Fair and other popular resorts. The recreations of the dukes and duchesses often strike one as being particularly juvenile. We get a glimpse of these things from Lady Cha-worth’s pen in December, 1676. “The Duchess,” she says, ” is much delighted with making and throwing of snowballs, and pelted the Duke soundly with one the other day, and ran away quick into her closet and he after her, but she durst not open the doore. She hath also great pleasure in one of those sledges which they call Trainias, and is pulled up and downe the ponds in them every day, as also the King, which are counted dangerous…