Lady Lamb. Warrior Kings from Charlemagne to Frederic the Great; with Illustrations by A. De Neuville and other Artists. London & New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1883. [12001]
Dark red cloth decorated in bright gilt and black, knight riding a steed on front cover with battle flags & shield, gilt dull on spine with shields & flags, binding a bit soiled with light edge-wear, tight, 8 1/2 x 6 inches. Frontispiece engraving lacks the tissue guard, foxing to engraving & title page. Twelve additional full-page plates plus in-text engravings, chapter head & tail pieces. vi., 378 clean pages; text is very good. Front end papers with thin tidemark in the top margin. Good. Hardcover.
Well-developed and informative accounts of Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Frederic Barbarossa, Richard Coeur de Lion, Edward I., Robert Bruce, Henry V., Francis I., Henri IV., Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII. of Sweden, and Fredric the Great.
Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, the wife of William Lamb, Chief Secretary for Ireland (1827-1828) and British Prime Minister (1834-1841). Lady Lamb was notorious for her affair with Lord Byron which ended in spectacular scandal. Her most famous work, Glenarvon, includes characters based upon herself and her lover.
"She was a member of the very highest of the immensely privileged aristocratic class. She knew the Prince of Wales. She was presented to the queens of France and Italy, and as a child told Edward Gibbon (the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) that his face was so ugly it had frightened her puppy. Thus began the reputation for outrageous behaviour which followed Caroline the rest of her life." - Malcolm Paul Douglass, The Literary Encyclopedia.
