1. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, XXXII: 831 (2 September 1871), pp.413, 421, 423, 425. The Central Park statue is a bronze copy of the one designed by John Steell in Edinburgh at the Scott monument. In the twentieth century, Scott's popularity declined, although in academia, there has been a resurgence of interest recently. But as literary scholar Michael Alexander writes, `Although Scott currently enjoys an academic rally, the present writer, in thirty-three years in Scottish universities, met a number of university teachers of English literature who, if they had tried a novel by Scott, had failed to finish it.' Michael Alexander,Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2007), p. 31.
2. Quoted in Mary Alice Mackay, `Sketch Club Drawings for Byron's "Darkness" and Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Master Drawings 35/2 (Summer1997): 142. On The Sketch Club, see also James T. Callow,Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp.12-29. Scott's poems occupied the members for two additional meetings after 27 March. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr, American Master Drawings and Watercolors: A History of Works on Paper from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1976), p. 116. On castles, see Ellwood C. Parry III, `Gothic Elegies for an American Audience: Thomas Cole's Repackaging of Imported Ideas', American Art Journal 8 (November 1976): 27-46 and Castles: An Enduring Fantasy, ed. Naomi Reed Kline (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1985), especially two essays: Leslie J. Workman, `To Castle Dangerous: The Influence of Scott', pp. 45-50 and Ellwood C. Parry III, `Towers Above the Trees in Romantic Landscape Paintings', pp. 61-70. See also Thomas K. Murphy, A Land Without Castles: The Changing Image of America in Europe, 1780-1830 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001). Recently, new scholarship has appeared on nineteenthcentury American painters' experiences in Italy, which often inspired paintings of Italian castles. See Linda S. Ferber, The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision (New York: The New-York Historical Society, 2009), 166-197 and William