human
(as they were wont to term their son and daughter,
gpt
as Mr Reginald and Miss Devereux were called 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character (deferential tenderness and submissive duty), are cast aside with other antique trumpery, and triumphantly superseded by the improved system of familiar intercourse, on terms of perfect equality, friendly and confidential, or cold and ceremonious, according to the character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
human
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
gpt
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
human
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