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The wretched lot

Of the poor, mean, despised, insulted Scot,

came to be the subject of banter, more or less good humoured. The Englishman, while retaining a due sense of his own superiority, learnt to acknowledge that his northern neighbour did really possess some good qualities which made him not unworthy of a place in the commonwealth, while the Scot, on his side, discovered that his ‘auld enemies’ of England were far from being all mere ‘pock-puddings.’ As the result of this greater intimacy of association, the smaller nation was necessarily drawn more and more to assimilate itself to the speech and ways of its larger, wealthier, and more advanced partner.

But the decline in Scottish national peculiarities during the hundred years that followed Culloden was slow compared with that of the second epoch, which dates from the first half of last century, when steam as a motive power came into use, rapidly transforming our manufacturing industries, and revolutionising the means of locomotion, alike on land and sea. Scott in his youth saw the relics of the older time while they were still fairly fresh and numerous, and he has left an imperishable memorial of them in his vivid descriptions. Cockburn beheld the last of these relics disappear, and as he lived well on into the second of the two periods, he could mark and has graphically chronicled the accelerated rate of change.