not been considered necessary to follow Mr. Rolfe in several alterations he has made on Lockhart; but he introduces one emendation which readily commends itself to the reader’s intelligence, and it is adopted in the present volume.  This is in the punctuation of the opening lines in the first stanza of Canto ii.  Lockhart completes a sentence at the end of the fifth line, whereas the sense manifestly carries the period on to the eleventh line.  In the third Introd., line 228, the reading of the earlier editions is followed in giving ‘From me’ instead of ’For me,’ as the meaning is thereby simplified and made more direct.  In iii. xiv. 234, the modern versions of Lockhart’s text give ’proudest princes veil their eyes,’ where Lockhart himself agrees with the earlier editions in reading ‘vail’.  The restoration of the latter form needs no defence.  The Elizabethan words in the Poem are not infrequent, giving it, as they do, a certain air of archaic dignity, and there can be little doubt that ‘vail’ was Scott’s word here, used in its Shakespearian sense of ‘lower’ or ‘cast down,’ and recalling Venus as ‘she vailed her eyelids.’

Marmion
A tale of flodden field
in six cantos

Alas! that Scottish maid should sing
The combat where her lover fell! 
That Scottish Bard should wake the string,
The triumph of our foes to tell! 
Leyden.

TO

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

HENRY, LORD MONTAGUE

&c. &c. &c.

THIS ROMANCE IS INSCRIBED

BY

THE AUTHOR

Advertisement * * * It is hardly to be expected, that an Author whom the Public have honoured with some degree of applause, should not be again a trespasser on their kindness.  Yet the Author of Marmion must be supposed to feel some anxiety concerning its success, since he is sensible that he hazards, by this second intrusion, any reputation which his first Poem may have procured him.  The present story turns upon the private adventures of a fictitious character; but is called a Tale of Flodden Field, because the hero’s fate is connected with that memorable defeat, and the causes which led to it.  The design of the Author was, if possible, to apprize his readers, at the outset, of the date of his Story, and to prepare them for the manners of the Age in which it is laid.  Any Historical Narrative, far more an attempt at Epic composition, exceeded his plan of a Romantic Tale; yet he may be permitted to hope, from the popularity of the lay of the last minstrel, that an attempt to paint the manners of the feudal times, upon a broader scale, and in the course of a more interesting story, will not be unacceptable to the Public.