The Maitland quarto manuscript containing poems by Sir Richard Maitland, Arbuthnot, and others PDF
Preview The Maitland quarto manuscript containing poems by Sir Richard Maitland, Arbuthnot, and others
Scs. ST£SA . f Gbe Scottish Sort Society The Maitland Quarto Manuscript 4 ~ TwJr The Maitland Quarto Manuscript Containing Poems by SIR RICHARD MAITLAND, ARBUTHNOT, And Others EDITED BY W. A. CRAIGIE, M.A., LL.D. RAWLINSON AND BOSWORTH PROFESSOR OF ANGLO-SAXON IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Printeti for tfye Societp fan WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON 1920 All Rights reserved PREFACE. The manuscript here printed is preserved, along with its elder companion the Maitland Folio, in the Pepysian Library at Cambridge. The description of it given by Pinkerton1 is as follows :— The Quarto Maitland MS. consists of 138 leaves; the pages not being marked, but the folios. It is written by Miss Mary Maitland, third daughter of Sir Richard. This appears from her name being inscribed twice on the page where the title ought to have stood; once in Italian capitals MARIE MAITLAND, 1586 ; and again in Roman letter Marie Maitland, 1586 ; as also from a poem by her (see No. 84 2), in which the length of her toil in transcribing this MS. is mentioned. It is exquisitely written in a great variety of the finest hands, and most of it as legible as the largest print; and were in perfect order, had not the foolish bookbinder damped it in binding, so that each page has given a faint impression on the other, which very much hurts the beauty of the MS. It is bound and ornamented like the Folio; as, indeed, are all Mr Pepys’s books and manuscripts. The grounds on which Pinkerton attributed the writing of the volume to Mary Maitland are plainly insufficient, and it is more probable that it was written for her by 1 Ancient Scottish Poems (1786), vol. ii. p. 467. 2 No. 86 in this edition. v PREFACE. some expert penman, whose work well deserves the praise given to it. Though Pinkerton speaks of “ a great variety of the finest hands,” the bulk of the manuscript is written in one or other of two styles—viz., a small but clear form of the old Scottish hand, and a large Italic lettering resembling print. Towards the end (from folio 129) there is greater variety, and more use of ornamental designs, but the whole appears to be by the same hand. The Scottish hand is commonly used for Sir Richard Maitland’s own poems and for other pieces of a similar nature, while the Italian hand is employed for pieces of a lighter or more modern character. The size of the pages is small (7^4 by 5^ inches), and the amount of text on each varies greatly according to the length of the lines and the style of writing employed. In this edition, in which the full contents of the manu- script are printed for the first time, the original has been followed page for page, and the different styles of hand- writing have been indicated by the use of different types. Those pieces which are written in the Scottish hand are printed in ordinary roman type, with the contractions expanded in italics ; those in the Italian hand are closely reproduced in italic lettering, with the few contractions retained. An endeavour has also been made to reproduce the more ornamental hands, the capital letters, and scribal flourishes, and in general to convey as distinct an idea of the appearance of the original as, could readily be done in print. With a very few exceptions the occasional errors of the scribe have not been corrected in the text, but are pointed out in the notes at the end of the volume. VI
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