Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February 1885Various
Religion
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
In a note to this passage he speaks of Ardennes as famous in
Boiardo’s “Orlando,” as immortal in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
Whatever may have been the case with Boiardo, it is all but certain
that Shakespeare’s “Arden” was not the Ardennes near Brussels,
but the forest of Arden, in Warwickshire, near his native town of
Stratford-on-Avon. He frequented this “Arden” in his youth, perhaps in
chasing the wild deer of Sir Thomas Lucy, perhaps in love-rambles with
Anne Hathaway. Portions of this English forest still remain, containing
in a now enclosed park—the property of a private gentleman—some
venerable oak trees, one of which as I roughly measured it with my
walking-stick is upwards of thirty feet in circumference within a yard
of the ground. This tree, with several others still standing, must
have been old in the days of Shakespeare; and in the shadow of which
he himself may have reclined in the happy days ere he went to London
in search of fame and fortune. “Arden,” spelled Ardennes in French,
is a purely Celtic word, meaning the high forest, from _Ard_, high,
and _Airdean_, heights. The English district is still called “Arden,”
and the small town of Henley, within its boundaries, is described as
Henley-in-Arden to distinguish it from the many other Henleys that
exist in England.
Lord William Lennox married the once celebrated cantatrice, Miss Wood,
from whom he was divorced. He was a somewhat voluminous author of
third-rate novels, and a frequent contributor to the periodical press.
He died in 1880, in his eighty-first year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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