PREFACE.

THIS edition of Marmion has been prepared on the same plan as that of The Lady of the Lake which I made two years ago; and, as in that, the illustrations are selected from the publishers' elegant holiday edition of the poem.

In the preface to The Lady of the Lake I said that the poem had not been printed correctly for more than fifty years. Marmion, so far as I can learn, has never been printed correctly. Scott appears to have overlooked sundry bad misprints in the first edition (which I have compared minutely with the fourth and all the more recent editions, English and American, that I could get hold of); and these errors of the type have been perpetuated until now. Lockhart professes to have revised the text carefully, with the aid of the author's interleaved copy of the edition of 1830; and we must give him credit for restoring one line (v. 947) accidentally omitted in the early editions, and for incorporating one or two trifling changes (as Badenoch-man for Highlandman in vi. 795) made by Scott in 1830; but he has not corrected a single one of the old misprints, while he has overlooked a number of new ones due to his own printers. On the whole, he has marred the text far more than he has mended it.

As a sample of the corruptions that date from the first publication of the poem, see the opening of Canto II., where the printer put a period in place of the comma Scott undoubtedly meant to have at the end of the 5th line. He did not detect the error, and, so far as I am aware, it has been repeated in every edition except this of mine. As the reader will see, it alters the construction, and makes nonsense of the passage. Again, in ii. 617, the first edition has a period instead of a comma at the end of the line, spoiling the grammar and the sense; and the period (or the colon, which is equally bad) has been retained from that day to this.

Of corruptions that appear (so far, at least, as my collation of the texts enables me to decide) for the first time in Lockhart's edition, I may mention ii. 464, where Scott wrote and printed "They knew not how, and knew not where," while Lockhart reads " nor knew not where." Scott is free in his use of archaic words and constructions, but I recall no instance in which he has indulged in this old "double

negative." Again, in v. 212, Scott's "For royal were his garb and mien is turned by Lockhart, or his printers, into For royal was," etc. In iv. 597, Scott has "peace and wealth has blessed;" but,

...

as any schoolboy could explain, that is not a parallel case. The archaisms to which I have just referred have proved, as in The Lady of the Lake, a stumbling-block to editors or their proof-readers. I have seen an edition of Shakespeare in which every instance of the obsolete vail (= lower, let fall) is "corrected" to veil, the difference being assumed to be one of spelling merely; and in Marmion, iii. 234, where the early editions all have vail, the recent ones all have veil. In vi. 608, where Scott uses the word again (if we may trust the early editions) Lockhart prints 'vails. Here a question may possibly be raised as to the true reading; but in iii. ind. 194 I have no doubt that Scott's word was sleights, as in all the early editions, and not slights, as in Lockhart's and all the later ones. Lockhart is also responsible, I believe, for the bad corruption of "For me," etc. for "From me," etc. in iii. ind. 228.

In iii. ind. 28, the first edition has "Some transient fit of loftier rhyme;" but every other edition that I have seen has "lofty rhyme." We may be sure that Scott wrote the former, and that he would never have altered it to the latter.

For further examples of the corruptions in former texts, as well as for further comments on those cited here, I must refer the reader to my Notes.

may add that Lockhart did not collate the early editions with sufficient care while comparing the printed text with the original MS.; for in several instances (see, for example, on iv. 635, 647, etc.), as in The Lady of the Lake, he gives readings as found only in the MS. which really occur in the first edition.

I have given most of Scott's own notes in full, and also those of Lockhart. A few have been slightly abridged, or partially rewritten. All the other notes are original, for I have met with no annotated edition of the poem except Scott's and Lockhart's. As I said in the preface to The Lady of the Lake, there are of course many notes that many readers will not need, but I think there are none that may not be of service, or at least of interest, to some reader; and I hope that no one will turn to them for help without finding it.

If, as is not unlikely, I have overlooked errors of my own while correcting those of others, I shall be grateful to any reader who wil favor me with a memorandum of such as he may detect

CAMBRIDGE, April 6, 1885.