When I first saw Mr. Osgood's beautiful illustrated edition of The Lady
of the Lake, I asked him to let me use some of the cuts in a cheaper
annotated edition for school and household use; and the present volume
is the result.
The text of the poem has given me unexpected trouble. When I edited
some of Gray's poems several years ago, I found that they had not been
correctly printed for more than half a century; but in the case of Scott
I supposed that the text of Black's so-called "Author's Edition" could
be depended upon as accurate. Almost at the start, however, I detected
sundry obvious misprints in one of the many forms in which this edition
is issued, and an examination of others showed that they were as bad in
their way. The "Shilling" issue was no worse than the costly illustrated
one of 1853, which had its own assortment of slips of the type. No two
editions that I could obtain agreed exactly in their readings. I tried
in vain to find a copy of the editio princeps (1810) in Cambridge and
Boston, but succeeded in getting one through a London bookseller. This
I compared, line by line, with the Edinburgh edition of 1821 (from the
Harvard Library), with Lockhart's first edition, the "Globe" edition,
and about a dozen others English and American. I found many misprints
and corruptions in all except the edition of 1821, and a few even in
that. For instance in i. 217 Scott wrote "Found in each cliff a narrow
bower," and it is so printed in the first edition; but in every other
that I have seen "cliff" appears in place of clift,, to the manifest
injury of the passage. In ii. 685, every edition that I have seen since
that of 1821 has "I meant not all my heart might say," which is worse
than nonsense, the correct reading being "my heat." In vi. 396, the
Scottish "boune" (though it occurs twice in other parts of the poem)
has been changed to "bound" in all editions since 1821; and, eight lines
below, the old word "barded" has become "barbed." Scores of similar
corruptions are recorded in my Notes, and need not be cited here.
I have restored the reading of the first edition, except in cases where
I have no doubt that the later reading is the poet's own correction or
alteration. There are obvious misprints in the first edition which Scott
himself overlooked (see on ii. 115, 217,, Vi. 527, etc.), and it is
sometimes difficult to decide whether a later reading--a change of a
plural to a singular, or like trivial variation--is a misprint or the
author's correction of an earlier misprint. I have done the best I
could, with the means at my command, to settle these questions, and am
at least certain that the text as I give it is nearer right than in
any edition since 1821 As all the variae lectiones are recorded in the
Notes, the reader who does not approve of the one I adopt can substitute
that which he prefers.
I have retained all Scott's Notes (a few of them have been somewhat
abridged) and all those added by Lockhart. [1] My own I have made as
concise as possible. There are, of course, many of them which many of
my readers will not need, but I think there are none that may not be of
service, or at least of interest, to some of them; and I hope that no
one will turn to them for help without finding it.
Scott is much given to the use of Elizabethan words and constructions,
and I have quoted many "parallelisms" from Shakespeare and his
contemporaries. I believe I have referred to my edition of Shakespeare
in only a single instance (on iii. 17), but teachers and others who have
that edition will find many additional illustrations in the Notes on the
passages cited.
While correcting the errors of former editors, I may have overlooked
some of my own. I am already indebted to the careful proofreaders of the
University Press for the detection of occasional slips in quotations or
references; and I shall be very grateful to my readers for a memorandum
of any others that they may discover.
Cambridge, June 23, 1883..