NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

New Zealander, Volume 5, Issue 418, 17 April 1850, Page 2

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

Although we have repeatedly stated that we require to be informed (in confidence) of the real name of every correspondent before we publish his commnnication, we still frequently receive anonymons letters, the waters of which should blame themselves — not us— if we take no notice of them. Our rule is ob« viousjy reasonable in all cases, while in some it is very important; and, we need not say, it is rigidly and almost universally adhered to by journalists at home. Dr. Dick's voluminous productions have obtained so much favour with a large and, in many respects, estimable class of readers, that we are not surprised to find some dissentients from the judgment of his writings in which we hinted, rather than fully expressed, our long and carefully foimed views of them (in our "Summary of Recent Deaths") on Saturday. Newspapers would assume a new and, we apprehend, a very disagreeable character, if all who were dissatisfied with a passing editorial stricture on a popular writer's effusions were to have liberty to dispute the point in detail in the Editor's own columns. We were not long since asked to admit this in a case in which we were prepared to maintain our originally expressed opinion by evidence of crushing force ; but we spared our readers such an infliction as the lengthy discussion of a matter in which most of them would have felt no interest must have been. In the present instance, however, we shall just show that others (and his own countiymen too) thiuk and say of Dr. Dick's books all— and considerably more— than we even suggested. We quote from the number for May, 1818, of Lowes Edinburgh Magazine, (a periodical, let U 3 take this opportunity of saying, which has rapidly risen into merited repute for its liteiary power and its religious conscientiousness). In referring to the re-appear-ance of the Doctor's Philosophy of Religion in the " Cheap Scries," issued by Mr. Collins of Glasgow, it is said — "Here is a perennial dish of quackery — one of those inevitable productions which at regular invals for many years past have issued from the pen of Dr. Dick, liy what mischance it happens we cannot tell, but the printer (if not the author) has inserted the word philosophy in all or most of these multi«tudinous sheets, and hence the assertion gets rivctted in the mind that Dr. Dick is, or must be, a philosopher. This, however, is a simple mistake and misapprehension of the gentle reader. The title, then, is the best part of the book, and the book itself is a heterogenous medley and concoction of all the threadbare common-places and superficialisms thai infest the more shallow race of thinkers." Why, ffi " roared as gently as a sucking dove in our comment on the poor Scotch Doctor's book-making, compared with the Free Church thunderer, Loivc.