and minute acquaintance with Scottish life and manners than I have.  But I shall be encouraged to hope for a favourable, or at least an indulgent, sentence upon these Reminiscences, if to any of my readers I shall have opened a fresh insight into the subject of social changes amongst us.  Many causes have their effect upon the habits and customs of mankind, and of late years such causes have been greatly multiplied in number and activity.  In many persons, and in some who have not altogether lost their national partialities, there is a general tendency to merge Scottish usages and Scottish expressions into the English forms, as being more correct and genteel.  The facilities for moving, not merely from place to place in our own country, but from one country to another; the spread of knowledge and information by means of periodical publications and newspapers; and the incredibly low prices at which literary works are produced, must have great effects.  Then there is the improved taste in art, which, together with literature, has been taken up by young men who, fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, or more, would have known no such sources of interest, or indeed who would have looked upon them as unmanly and effeminate.  When first these pursuits were taken up by our Scottish young men, they excited in the north much amazement, and, I fear, contempt, as was evinced by a laird of the old school, who, the first time he saw a young man at the pianoforte, asked, with evident disgust, “Can the creature sew ony?” evidently putting the accomplishment of playing the pianoforte and the accomplishment of the needle in the same category.

The greater facility of producing books, prints, and other articles which tend to the comfort and embellishment of domestic life, must have considerable influence upon the habits and tastes of a people.  I have often thought how much effect might be traced to the single circumstance of the cheap production of pianofortes.  An increased facility of procuring the means of acquaintance with good works of art and literature acts both as cause and effect.  A growing and improved taste tends to stimulate the production of the best works of art.  These, in return, foster and advance the power of forming a due estimate of art.  In the higher department of music, for example, the cheap rate not only of hearing compositions of the first class, but of possessing the works of the most eminent composers, must have had influence upon thousands.  The principal oratorios of Handel may be purchased for as many shillings each as they cost pounds years ago.  Indeed, at that time the very names of those immortal works were known only to a few who were skilled to appreciate their high beauties.  Now associations are formed for practising and studying the choral works of the great masters.