Excerpt from Scott and Scotland, or Historical and Romantic Illustrations of Scottish History As we have a great aversion to read a preface ourselves, so is it much against our will that we impose the task upon others. If a book be bad, a preface, however finely it may be written, will not improve it; and if the book be good, it needs nothing, save its own contents, to recommend it. However, it is the fashion to have a preface, and a book which wanted it would be incomplete; and therefore is it that one is prefixed to this. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.