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To Arthur John Butler
Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
March 16th 1871

MS Mrs Caroline Fairclough/25

My dear Arthur
Arianwen means silver lady. She was a Welsh saint and the name has never quite died out in Wales, so I suppose the girl has Welsh belongings of some sort. Arian rhod a silver bow is the rain bow, who scares away spirits of wrath there is a charming bit about her in old Davis’s Celtic researches which nobody believes now. Alas! Macmillan took advice about the School room magazine till his heart failed him and he would not try it. I think it is a pity, but those grand people must embark on a large scale if they do it at all. And war literature has so filled the Monthly Packet that I have never had room for that chapter of Polly all this time.1

yours sincerely
C M Yonge

1Butler, who was the son of CMY's friend the Rev. W. J. Butler, Vicar of Wantage, shared her enthusiasm for etymology (expressed in her ground-breaking History of Christian Names, and collaborated with her on a series of articles in MP on comparative linguistics under the title 'Polyglot Parsing'.
Cite this letter


The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge(1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

URL to this Letter is: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/2402/to-arthur-john-butler-12

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