From what cause is not known, and it is difficult to conceive any that
can justify such extraordinary neglect, young Charles was left in
Shropshire, upon the removal of his parents to Chester; and abandoned,
not only during his infancy, but even during his boyhood, to the care
of an uncultivated and utterly ignorant, but worthy and affectionate
old nurse, called Dame Ball, in the rustic village of Condover, not far
from Shrewsbury.
His reminiscences upon this period were amongst those the most
tenaciously minute, and the most agreeable to his fancy for detail, of
any part of his life; and the uncommon gaiety of his narratory powers,
and the frankness with which he set forth the pecuniary embarrassments
and provoking mischances, to which his thus deserted childhood was
exposed, had an ingenuousness, a good-humour, and a comicality, that
made the subject of Condover not more delectable to himself than
entertaining to his hearer.
Nevertheless, these accounts, when committed to paper, and produced
without the versatility of countenance, and the vivacious gestures that
animated the colloquial disclosures, so lose their charm, as to appear
vapid, languid, and tedious: and the editor only thus slightly recurs
to them for the purpose of pointing out how gifted must be the man who,
through disadvantages of so lowering a species, could become, in
after-life, not only one of the best informed, but one of the most
polished, members of society.
There were few subjects of his childish remembrance with which he was
himself more amused, than with the recital of the favourite couplets
which the good nurse Ball most frequently sang to him at her spinning
wheel; and which he especially loved to chaunt, in imitating her
longdrawn face, and the dolorous tones of her drawling sadness.
“Good bye, my dear neighbours! My heart it is sore,
For I must go travelling all the world o’er.
And if I should chance to come home very rich,
My friends and relations will make of me mich;
But if I should chance to come home very poor,
My friends and relations will turn me out of door,
After I have been travelling, travelling, travelling, all the
world o’er.”