PERSONAL.

THREE-AND-TWENTY years have passed since
I entered on my present relations with the
Public. They began when I was so young,
that I find them to have existed for nearly a
quarter of a century.

Through all that time I have tried to be
as faithful to the Public, as they have been
to me. It was my duty never to trifle with
them, or deceive them, or presume upon their
favor, or do any thing with it but work hard
to justify it. I have always endeavoured to
discharge that duty.

My conspicuous position has often made
me the subject of fabulous stories and
unaccountable statements. Occasionally, such
things have chafed me, or even wounded me;
but, I have always accepted them as the
shadows inseparable from the light of my
notoriety and success. I have never obtruded
any such personal uneasiness of mine, upon
the generous aggregate of my audience.

For the first time in my life, and I believe
for the last, I now deviate from the principle
I have so long observed, by presenting
myself in my own Journal in my own
private character, and entreating all my
brethren (as they deem that they have reason
to think well of me, and to know that I am a
man who has ever been unaffectedly true to
our common calling), to lend their aid to the
dissemination of my present words.

Some domestic trouble of mine, of long-
standing, on which I will make no further
remark than that it claims to be respected,
as being of a sacredly private nature, has
lately been brought to an arrangement, which
involves no anger or ill-will of any kind,
and the whole origin, progress, and
surrounding circumstances of which have been,
throughout, within the knowledge of my
children. It is amicably composed, and its
details have now but to be forgotten by
those concerned in it.

By some means, arising out of wickedness,
or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild
chance, or out of all three, this trouble has
been made the occasion of misrepresentations,
most grossly false, most monstrous, and
most cruel—involving, not only me, but
innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent
persons of whom I have no knowledge,
if, indeed, they have any existence—and so
widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in
a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom
some touch of the breath of these slanders
will not have passed, like an unwholesome
air.

Those who know me and my nature, need
no assurance under my hand that such
calumnies are as irreconcileable with me, as
they are, in their frantic incoherence, with
one another. But, there is a great multitude
who know me through my writings, and who
do not know me otherwise; and I cannot
bear that one of them should be left in
doubt, or hazard of doubt, through my poorly
shrinking from taking the unusual means to
which I now resort, of circulating the Truth.

I most solemnly declare, then—and this
I do, both in my own name and in my wife's
name—that all the lately whispered rumours
touching the trouble at which I have glanced,
are abominably false. And that whosoever
repeats one of them after this denial, will lie
as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for
any false witness to lie, before Heaven and
earth.

CHARLES DICKENS.