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,
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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
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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.”