1 For a good general description of Scott's American vogue, see Hart, James D., The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 67–84. Important critical studies of Scott's American influence are Davie, Donald, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961); Pearce, Roy Harvey, Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 163–68; Doubleday, Neal F., Hawthorne's Early Tales: A Critical Study (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 14–18. My own James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist: The American Scott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) is the fullest study of Scott's importance for Cooper.
2 The pioneer descriptive account of the literary versions of the story is Orians, G. Harrison, “The Angel of Hadley in Fiction: A Study of the Sources of Hawthorne's ‘The Gray Champion,’” American Literature, 4 (11 1932), 257–69. Valuable interpretative studies, mainly of Hawthorne's rendering of the story, are by Bell, Michael Davitt, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 27–33 and 47–53; Doubleday, pp. 22–23 and 85–92; and Brumm, Ursula, “A Regicide Judge as ‘Champion’ of American Independence,” Amerikastudien, 21 (1976), 177–86.
3 Hutchinson, Thomas, The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1764), 1, 294, 219.
4 Stiles, Ezra, History of the Judges of Charles I (Hartford, 1794), quoted by Orians, p. 258.
5 Dwight, Timothy, Travels in New-England and New-York (1821; British edn., London, 1823), pp. 317–18.
6 Janson, Charles William, The Stranger in America (London, 1807), p. 51, quoted in The Edinburgh Review, 10 (April 1807), 107. I owe this reference to Scott's bibliographer, Dr. J. C Corson.
8 Washington Irving: Letters, 1802–1823, ed. Aderman, Ralph M., Kleinfeld, Herbert L., and Banks, Jennifer S. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 1, 469.
9 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 1821–1823, ed. Grierson, H. J. C. (London: Constable, 1934), p. 81.
10 SirScott, Walter, Peveril of the Peak, ed. Lang, Andrew (London, 1899), p. 223.
11 Yvor Winters, “Maule's Curse, or Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory” (1938), rpt. in In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 170–72.
12 Sir Walter Scott, “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe” (1824), rpt. in Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Williams, Ioan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 115–16.
13 SirScott, Walter, “Romance” (1824), The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh, 1834), 6, 129.
14 Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Stern, Milton R. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1975), p. 57.
15 Brumm, Ursula was the first to examine the “King in the Mountain” motif in Peveril (Brumm, pp. 181–83). She notes Irving's allusion to the Barbarossa legend in a note to “Rip Van Winkle” – an allusion which may seem the more significant in view of Irving's possible role in bringing the Angel of Hadley legend to Scott's attention and of what seems an “anachronistic” reference to Rip in “The Gray Champion” (discussed later).
16 It seems likely that Cooper had also seen or read a stage version of The Angel of Hadley incident, obviously inspired by Peveril, in Thomas Barker's Superstition (1824). The best general discussion to date of Cooper's stadialism is in Smith, Henry Nash's Virgin Land: The American West as symbol and Myth (1950; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1957), pp. 253–60. Richly suggestive for the study of Cooper is Duncan Forbes' seminal article on the influence of stadialist thought on Scott's historicism, “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott”, Cambridge Journal, 7 (10 1953), 20–35.
17 I quote from the British first edn., entitled The Borderers (London, 1829), 3, 23. I am responsible for the italics.
17 Hawthorne was certainly familiar with Scott's and Hutchinson's versions of the Angel of Hadley story, and it seems probable that his interest in the subject would have caused him to follow up references to The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish and Dwight's Travels which Scott added in a note to Peveril in 1832. Dwight's discussion of the Hadley legend is cheek by jowl with a chapter on the Revolution of 1689: a suggestive juxtaposition which might have caught Hawthorne's eye.
18 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Gray Champion,” Twice-Told Tales, ed. Crowley, J. Donald (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 18.
19 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Charvat, William et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), p. 64.
