THE

LADY OF THE LAKE

BY

SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART.

EDITED WITH NOTES BY

WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A. M., LITT. D.

FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

HARVARD
COLLEGE

LIBRARY

Copyright, 1882 and 1883,

BY JAMES R. Osgood and Company.

Copyright, 1908,

BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A

PREFACE.

WHEN I first saw the beautiful illustrated Holiday Edition of The Lady of the Lake, I asked to be allowed to 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 clift 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. [See also "Addendum," p. 269 below]

I have restored the reading of the first edition, except in cases where I have no doubt that the latter 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. All variæ lectiones are recorded in the Notes.

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.

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE REVISED EDITION.

In this edition an "Historical Introduction" (pp. vii-xvi) and a "Pronouncing Glossary" of Scottish words (p. 274) have been incorporated. I may add that down to the present time (1908) all or most of the misprints and corruptions noted by me have been retained in both school and "standard" editions (including one "edited" by Mr. Andrew Lang a few years ago), except in the few that have adopted my text, with or without giving me credit.

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.

The Lady of the Lake, the third of Scott's "metrical romances" (The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion having preceded it in 1805 and 1808), was, like its predecessors, founded upon history, though, as the author explained in his preface of 1830 (see page 175 below), it varies somewhat from the facts of history, as the earlier poems did, and as historical novels (Scott's and others) always do. While it was intended to be true in the main to the manners and customs of the ancient Highlanders of Scotland, it was an idealized picture" of their character and life.

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Until the middle of the eighteenth century these people of northern Scotland were little known to their English neighbors, only about five hundred miles away. Macaulay, in his History of England (chap. xiii.) says of that period: " In the south of our island scarcely anything was known about the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens, the woods and the waters, were indeed the same that. now swarm every autumn with admiring gazers and sketchers; . yet none of these sights had power to attract a. single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. About the year 1730, Captain Burt, one of the first Englishmen who caught a glimpse of the spots which now allure tourists from every part of the civilized world,. wrote an account of his wanderings. He was evidently a man of a quick, an observant, and a cultivated mind, and

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