“You have a view,” says he, “somewhat sublime and striking from its mere extent and suddenness but it is flat as a pancake. The road is through level, moorish, unpleasant ground from the bottom of that hill to Newark, but, as road, excellent.” No guide-book ever pictured a view so vividly as this description, which may stand unaltered to-day. Gonerby Hill—“Gunnerby” is the correct pronunciation of the word—is something more to us in these pages than merely a hill. It is a place of literary eminence, whose terrors are enshrined in the pages of Scott and Ainsworth. Jeanie Deans, of all the romantic and historic characters that people this historic and romantic road the most prominent, is especially to be identified with this height. Historic she is because there is a substantial basis of truth in the character of Sir Walter Scott’s heroine, and of Effie and many another figure in the _Heart of Midlothian_. They have fictitious names, but some were real persons. Helen Walker, who died in 1791 and was buried in the churchyard of Irongray, near Dumfries, is the prototype of Jeanie. She had in 1737 walked to London and sought a pardon for her sister, Isabella, condemned to death by the ferocious Scots law on a _presumption_ of having murdered her child. She actually did (as Scott’s heroine is described as having done) seek the Duke of Argyle and through his interest obtain the object of her journey; but Scott is responsible for the embroidery of this simple and affecting story; for he never saw Helen Walker, and she, with Scottish closeness, never described her adventures, being only too anxiously concerned that the story of her sister’s shame should be forgotten. It is a curious and (admirable or not, as one may personally think it) unusual conscience that would hesitate to stretch a point in evidence when to do so would be to save the life of a loved sister; and more strange still to find so unbending a moralist enduring the toils and dangers of a four-hundred miles’ tramp with the bare possibility of preserving the life of the sinner in view at the end; but to understand the workings of the Scottish conscience is beyond the mental reach of any one who does not chance to be either a Scot or a Presbyterian.