iginal publication, and a few comments which it
would not have been in good taste to make in the first instance.
Throughout his original work, Lockhart, with all his openness of
speech, yet refrained from certain personal references, the subjects
of which were too recent for remark, and he concealed many names under
the disguise of initials.

Since the edition of 1839 there have been many issues of this great
work on both sides of the Atlantic. As late as 1861, Messrs. Ticknor
and Fields, predecessors of the present publishers of the work, issued
an edition in nine volumes, and took occasion to insert some material
from Lockhart's abridgment. They prefaced the edition, which they
dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, with a brief sketch of Lockhart.

Neither {p.vi} these publishers nor any others, so far as we know,
have ever done more than reprint the original work, save for the
slight modification just mentioned. Meanwhile for the past sixty
years, and more especially during the past twenty years, a crowd of
books has been published throwing light on Lockhart's great subject.
Memoirs, reminiscences, editions of Scott's writings, literary
studies, articles in reviews and magazines have added materially to
our knowledge not only of Scott, but of many others of the personages
who throng the chapters of Lockhart's work. Lockhart himself has been
made the subject of a generous biography, and it would seem as though,
lasting as is the fame of the _Life_, its necessary silences were
becoming every year more conspicuous.

Accordingly, the present publishers resolved to issue an edition which
should repair the damage which Time had wrought, and they entrusted
the editing to Miss Susan M. Francis, who through her long conversance
with the original work, and her familiarity with the literature which
has grown up about Scott, as well as her knowledge of the more or less
obscure sources of information, was peculiarly competent not only to
do the service of Old Mortality, but to set in order the inscriptions
still to be added to the stones of Scott's associates.

The principle upon which Lockhart's Scott is now edited may be stated
in very few words. The original work is reprinted without change,
except that initials have been extended to full names in a great many
instances, obvious printers' errors corrected, and Scott's journals
revised to conform with the authoritative edition by Mr. David
Douglas. Then, the text has been annot