The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lady of the Lake, by Sir Walter Scott

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Title: The Lady of the Lake

Author: Sir Walter Scott

Commentator: William J. Rolfe

Editor: William J. Rolfe

Posting Date: February 9, 2009 [EBook #3011]
Release Date: January, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LADY OF THE LAKE ***

Produced by J.C. Byers

THE LADY OF THE LAKE

By Sir Walter Scott, Bart.

Edited with Notes By William J. Rolfe,

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 o