The Lady of the Lake

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
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