Footnotes

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION – an important work in the history of Queen Mary as a cultural icon, one which has exercised as powerful a fascination in France – the land where she had lived since a child and where she had been queen and whose language she favoured – as well as Scotland and England. Lamartine's work was first published in English translation by Adam & Charles Black of Edinburgh in 1859; the translator, who went under the initials 'J.M.H.', stating that 'It may be remarked that the present is the only work of M. de Lamartine which has appeared solely in an English form, having been expressly translated from the original unpublished MS.' (the original French version was to be in print by 1869). In the words of one contemporary reviewer: 'It would be a mistake to criticise this book as a regular historical work. It is not, and does not profess to be, more than a summary statement of the author's own impression of the life and character of Mary Stuart, based on the researches of M. Dargaud... The author's object is to convey an idea of the romantic interest attached to the career of the Scottish Queen; and, with the intuition of a painter, he spreads upon his canvas the darker as well as the lighter hues of his heroine's character – and, to use his own words, pictures her as "closing by a saintly death the life of Clytemnestra"' (Economist, 20 August 1859).

Three pages of this manuscript, as noted above, were used as copytext for the original 1859 printing. These contain verses composed by Mary which the 1859 printing quotes in the original French. Our manuscript has also been marked up with square brackets, indicating omissions; which, by and large, appear to have been followed by the 1859 printing. A number of revisions appear to be in Lamartine's hand (although, if so, his protean and usually very cursive script is more carefully written than usual, as befits the context). The addition in English on p. 14 is more likely, perhaps, to be in the handwriting of the translator 'J.M.H.'. At this point Lamartine's French text has been scored through: "'L'Ecosse qui va nous la ravir continue le poète, fuirait si loin dans la brume de ses mers que ton vaisseau renoncerait à l'aborder" and substituted in the margin by the English: "'Scotland,' continues the Poet, 'which is about to snatch thee from us – disappears to such a distance in the mist of its seas that her ship will never reach its shores'". Although this is not the version that was printed, which instead runs: '"Scotland," continues the poet, "which is about to snatch her from us, becomes so dim in the mist of its seas that her ship will never reach its shores"'. When the work was reprinted in the original French, the scored-through version was to be reinstated.