ed by the servants and tenantry) had
attained--the former to the mature age of fifty years--the latter to
that of forty-eight, before the children were called on to pay the last
duties to those dear and honoured parents, to whom they had been
children indeed--in a sense of the word little understood in our day of
enlightened liberality, when, for the most part, the obsolete virtues
that were then thought beautiful and becoming in the filial character
(deferential tenderness and submissive duty), are cast aside with other
antique trumpery, and triumphantly superseded by the improved system of
familiar intercourse, on terms of perfect equality, friendly and
confidential, or cold and ceremonious, according to the character and
circumstances of the parties, whose filial and parental relations, like
those of "the beasts that perish," appear to cease with the flight of
the young brood, or the sprouting of its pen-feathers. I can remember
that when I was an idle boy, the antiquated fashions of Devereux Hall
sometimes excited in me "a laughing devil," that was scarcely repressed
by the frowning of my anxious mother, or my own profound veneration for
our excellent friends and neighbours--and that the wicked spirit had
nearly got the better of me on more than one occasion, when Mrs Devereux
would tenderly censure for "youthful heedlessness or imprudence" the
sedate spinster, whose years outnumbered those of my own mother, or when
Mr Reginald, while undergoing his seventh annual attack of gout, was
alluded to as "the dear boy," by his sympathising father. But if my
boyish mirth was sometimes excited by these and suchlike innocent and
natural incongruities, far other feelings--such as I firmly believe have
been happily influential in the formation of my character--were oftener
awakened in me, by the example, early witnessed at the dear old Hall, of
tender union, pure morality, and genuine Christianity. And when I look
back upon those old times and antiquated manners (antiquated even in
that long past day), and contrast them with our modern times and modern
code, I am disposed to think we have gained less by exploding the
stateliness and formality of our ancestors, than we have lost in
degenerating from their high-toned politeness and true English
hospitality into fashionable ease, often (in the higher ranks
especially) amounting to vulgarity, and a style of living with which it
would be absurd to connect the idea of social intercours