PENRITH HERALD and EAST CUMBERLAND and WESTMORLAND NEWS. NO. 438-Sixth Week in Quarter Registered for Transmission Abroad. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1874. PRICE 1D. FORSTER's LIFE OF DICKENS. The third volume of MR. FORSTER's "Life of Charles Dickens" has been issued. MR. FORSTER, after describing the circumstances under which he commenced his public readings, characterised as "The Plunge", thus records his separation from his wife: "Exactly a fortnight after the reading for the Children's Hospital, on Thursday, the 29th April, came the first public reading for his own benefit; and before the next month was over this launch into a new life had been followed by a change in his old home. Thereforward he and his wife lived apart. The eldest son went with his mother, DICKENS at once giving effect to her expressed wish in this respect; and the other children remained with himself, their intercourse with MRS. DICKENS being left entirely to themselves. It was thus far an arrangement of a strictly private nature, and no decent person could have had excuse for regarding it in any other light, if public attention had not been unexpectedly invited to it by a printed statement in "Household Words". DICKENS was stung by this, by some miserable gossip at which in ordinary circumstances no man would more determinedly have been silent; but he had now publicly to show himself, at stated times, as a public entertainer, and this, even with his name even so aspersed, he found to be impossible. All he would concede to my strenuous resistance against such a publication, was an offer to suppress it, if upon reference to the opinion of a certain distinguished man (still living) that opinion should prove to be in agreement with mine. Unhappily it fell in with his own, and the publication went on. It was followed by another statement, a letter subscribed with his name, which got into print without his sanction, nothing publicly being know of it (I was not among those who had read it privately), until it appeared in the New York Tribune. It had been addressed and given to MR. ARTHUR SMITH as an authority for correction of false rumours and scandals, and MR. SMITH had given a copy of it, with like intention, to the Tribune correspondent in London. Its writer referred to it always afterwards as his " violated letter ". The course taken by the author of this book at the time of these occurrences will not be departed from here. Such illustration of grave defects in DICKENS's character as the passage in his life affords I have not shrunk from placing side by side with such excuses in regard to it as he had unquestionable right to claim, should be put forward also. How far what remained of his story took tone or colour from it, and especially from the altered career on which at the same time he entered, will thus be sufficiently explained; and with anything else the public have nothing to do. **********************************************************************************************