31 MAY 1873, Page 3

A correspondent sent by the Daily Telegraph to Russia and

-the Steppes has been playing that journal a very shabby trick, —one, moreover, by no means likely to redound to his own advantage,—by sending rechauffes of what he thinks the best passages of Isis correspondence with that journal to other English periodicals, like All the Year Round, though not of course without to some extent altering the dressing, and so making a description serve for the description of a scene in the Crimea, which he had written in the first instance as the description of one on the borders of Persia. This shabby trick of the poor litte'rateur has brought on the Telegraph what is evidently the very unjust charge that its Russian cor- respondence has all been written in Fleet Street. But those who know the wicked ways of literature are aware that though uphill-journals have not unfrequently played such tricks on the public, it is consistent neither with the interests nor with the pride of papers as successful as the Daily Telegraph, to act in this way. Bather is a little ostentation,— such as its recent liberal offer for the Assyrian excavations,—its 'characteristic temptation ; and for our own parts, we do not doubt that our contemporary has been betrayed by some not very wise or scrupulous correspondent, who is but too likely to find his economical manipulation of the same materials in so many different forms, fatal to his success in the calling he has embraced. The "law of parsimony" may be over-worked in the region of literature.