It is more than twenty years since Robert
Patterson's death, which took place on the highroad near
Lockerby, where he was found exhausted and expiring. The white
pony, the companion of his pilgrimage, was standing by the side
of its dying master the whole furnishing a scene not unfitted for
the pencil. These particulars I had from Mr. Train.
Another debt, which I pay most willingly, I owe to an unknown
correspondent (a lady), [The late Mrs. Goldie.] who favoured me
with the history of the upright and high-principled female, whom,
in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, I have termed Jeanie Deans. The
circumstance of her refusing to save her sister's life by an act
of perjury, and undertaking a pilgrimage to London to obtain her
pardon, are both represented as true by my fair and obliging
correspondent; and they led me to consider the possibility of
rendering a fictitious personage interesting by mere dignity of
mind and rectitude of principle, assisted by unpretending good
sense and temper, without any of the beauty, grace, talent,
accomplishment, and wit to which a heroine of romance is supposed
to have a prescriptive right.
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