The Lady of the Lake | Page 3

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The Lady of the Lake

by
Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
Edited with Notes
By
William J. Rolfe, A.M.
Formerly Head Master of the High School,
Cambridge, Mass.
Boston
1883
Preface
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 r eading 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