Sufficient for us, however, is the entry in these same registers:—
“Mary Russell, daughter of George and Mary Midford, baptized February 29, 1788”—
the child having been born on December 16, 1787.
Of these early days we have, fortunately, a picture left by the child herself. “A pleasant home, in truth, it was,” she writes. “A large house in a little town of the north of Hampshire—a town, so small, that but for an ancient market, very slenderly attended, nobody would have dreamt of calling it anything but a village.[3] The breakfast room, where I first possessed myself of my beloved ballads, was a lofty and spacious apartment, literally lined with books, which, with its Turkey carpet, its glowing fire, its sofas, and its easy chairs, seemed, what indeed it was, a very nest of English comfort. The windows opened on a large old-fashioned garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, roses, honeysuckles and pinks; and that again led into a grassy orchard, abounding with fruit-trees. What a playground was that orchard! and what playfellows were mine! Nancy [her maid], with her trim prettiness, my own dear father, handsomest and cheerfullest of men, and the great Newfoundland dog, Coe, who used to lie down at my feet, as if to invite me to mount him, and then to prance off with his burthen, as if he enjoyed the fun as much as we did. Most undoubtedly I was a spoilt child. When I recollect certain passages of my thrice-happy early life, I cannot have the slightest doubt about the matter, although it contradicts all foregone conclusions, all nursery and schoolroom morality, to say so. But facts are stubborn things. Spoilt I was. Everybody spoilt me—most of all the person whose power in that way was greatest: the dear papa himself. Not content with spoiling me indoors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called my bridle (those were days of pig-tails), hung so fast, and tugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating and the powder flying down his back. That climax of mischief was the crowning joy of all. I can hear our shouts of laughter now.”
A pretty picture this, and one to which, as she wrote of it, the tired old woman looked back as on one of the few oases in a life which, despite certain successes, was nothing short of a desert of weariness and of struggle with poverty.
But apart from this boisterous love of play, the little girl early developed a passion for reading, fostered and encouraged, no doubt, by that “grave home-loving mother,” who “never in her life read any book but devotion,” in whose room, indeed, it was matter for astonished comment to find the works of Spenser.
At the age of three, little Mary showed a remarkable precocity of intellect, and even before she had reached that early age her father was accustomed to perch her on the breakfast-table to exhibit her one accomplishment to admiring guests, “who admired all the more, because, a small puny child, looking far younger than I really was, nicely dressed, as only children generally are, and gifted with an affluence of curls, I might have passed for the twin sister of my own great doll.”
On such occasions she would be given one or other of the Whig newspapers of the day—the Courier or Morning Chronicle—and, to the delight of her father and the wonder of the guests, would prattle forth the high-seasoned political pronouncements with which those journals were filled.
Following this display there was, of course, reward; not with sweetmeats, however, “too plentiful in my case to be very greatly cared for,” but by the reading of the “Children in the Wood” by mother from Percy’s Reliques, “and I looked for my favourite ballad after every performance, just as the piping bullfinch that hung in the window looked for his lump of sugar after going through ‘God save the King.’ The two cases were exactly parallel.”
But one day “the dear mamma” was absent and could not administer the customary reward, with the result that papa had to read the “Children in the Wood,” though not before he had searched the shelves to find the, to him, unfamiliar volumes. Following which search and labour he was easily constrained by the petted child to hand over the book to Nancy, that she might read extracts whenever called upon. And when Nancy, as was inevitable, waxed weary of the “Children in the Wood,” she gradually took to reading other of the ballads; “and as from three years old I grew to be four or five, I learned to read them myself, and the book became the delight of my childhood, as it is now the solace of my age.”