INFANCY.
The following is an account which I somewhere read of Nell Gwynn, when a child:—“My first love, you must know, was a link-boy,”—“A what?”—“’Tis true,” said she, “for all the frightfulness of your what!—and a very good soul he was, too, poor Dick! and had the heart of a gentleman; God knows what has become of him, but when I last saw him he said he would humbly love me to his dying day. He used to say that I must have been a lord’s daughter for my beauty, and that I ought to ride in my coach; and he behaved to me as if I did. He, poor boy, would light me and my mother home, when we had sold our oranges, to our lodgings in Lewknor’s Lane, as if we had been ladies of the land. He said he never felt easy for the evening ’till he had asked me how I did, then he went gaily about his work; and if he saw us housed at night, he slept like a prince. I shall never forget when he came flushing and stammering, and drew out of his pocket a pair of worsted stockings, which he brought for my naked feet. It was bitter cold weather; and I had chilblains, which made me hobble about ’till I cried,—and what does poor Richard do but work hard like a horse, and buy me these worsted stockings? My mother bade him put them on; and so he did, and his warm tears fell on my chilblains, and he said he should be the happiest lad on earth if the stockings did me any good.”
When the Commissioners visited the Penitentiary at Lambeth, where the prisoners are punished by solitary confinement, they found in one cell a little girl, between eleven and twelve years of age. This child must have spent many hours every day in the dark; was poorly clad, and scantily fed, and her young limbs were deprived of all the joyous modes of playful exercise, so necessary and so pleasant to that age: she asked neither for food, nor clothes, nor light, nor liberty,—all she wished for was “a little doll, that she might dress and nurse it.” Her innocent and child-like request put an end to this cruel punishment for children.
“I yesterday took my dear grand-daughter to see Westminster Abbey. She is between seven and eight years of age, and is one of the sweetest angels that ever existed on earth. It was a bitter cold morning: on the tomb of Mrs. Warren, who was a mother to poor children, there is a beautiful statue of a poor half-clothed Irish girl, with her little naked baby in her arms;—my dear little child looked up at me, and, through her tears, earnestly said, ‘How I should like to nurse that little baby!’”