THE aim in this edition of SCOTT'S POEMS has been to give a correct text, with such portions of Scott's notes as are likely to be useful or interesting to the general reader, and with fuller and better pictorial illustrations than are to be found in any former edition. The volume contains all the poems (not the plays, which are seldom, if ever, read nowadays, unless as mere literary curiosities), with the exception of a few bits of personal or occasional verse which Scott himself would never have printed, and which are not worth preserving. The original contributions to the Border Minstrelsy are included, except Scott's portion of Thomas the Rhymer (the Third Part only), which could not well be separated from the rest. Of the Songs scattered through the novels and plays, the best of such as are comparatively independent of the context are given, together with all the poetical mottoes written by Scott himself for the heading of chapters. The text of all the editions, English or American, published during the last fifty years, is more or less corrupt. I do not except that of Lockhart, who very rarely corrected an error in Scott's editions, while he allowed many slips made by his own printers to pass undetected. In the prefaces to the "Students' Edition" of the Lady of the Lake and Marmion, I have quoted examples of these corruptions, some of which are almost incredibly bad. Marmion, as I have shown, was never printed correctly until I edited it, sundry misprints in the first edition having been overlooked by Scott and by all his commentators and critics. This is the more amazing, inasmuch as the passages in which the errors occurred became utterly nonsensical. In carefully collating the text of all the other long poems with that of the earliest editions I have been able to obtain (I have not always succeeded in getting hold of the first edition), I have found corruptions quite as bad as those in the Lady and Marmion. In the minor poems I have met with comparatively few of these inaccuracies. The punctuation has been revised throughout, in accordance with the best recent usage, thousands of the superfluous points with which former editions are so plentifully besprinkled having been deleted. In abridging Scott's voluminous notes (they have been merely abridged. without alteration of the portions retained), I have omitted nothing which the reader who turns to them for explanation or illustration of the text is likely to miss. That the longer notes have been little read, is evident from the fact that Lockhart's accidental dropping of a whole page from one in the Lady in 1833, which destroyed the sense by uniting the fragments of two independent sentences, was not observed, or at least not pointed out, until I called attention to it in 1883. The Glossary contains all the words explained in Scott's shorter notes, with a few additions of my own. The engravings may be trusted to speak for themselves. Whether for beauty or for accuracy, they may challenge comparison with anything that has appeared in former editions on either side of the Atlantic. |