Personally, I am a Protectionist.  Formerly I indulged in that monstrous absurdity, Free Trade, but then I was an importer; now, being a manufacturer, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I am of the straitest sect a Protectionist.  You can’t give me too much of it.  Of course I can’t see why pig-iron should be protected, and pigs not.  I think every native production should be cared for, and that there should be an excessively high tariff on foreign food.  In that case poor REVERDY JOHNSON would have been compelled to have passed a Lenten season at Halifax, until he had eradicated from his system the rich English dinners, before he could have entered this favored land.  And MOTLEY—­bless me, he has eaten so much that I don’t believe he could get it out of his body if he fasted for the remainder of his natural life.

I am informed, however, that Protection does us one injury.  All the World says that there is a Parsee in our land, who is loaded with rupees, but who is unable to spend them here because of our protective system, and what all the World says, you know, must be true.  However, there are 40,000,000 of us, and, if Congress will make all Americans buy my patent door-knobs, the Parsee can go to—­Hindostan.

I don’t think any thing more can be said about Protection.  Any body who doesn’t understand it now had better go to Washington, and listen to the debate on scrap-iron.  That will sharpen his wits.  Pig-iron, of course, is interesting, but then that’s a light and airy subject.  Hear the debate on scrap-iron, by all means.

LOT.

* * * * *

A LITERARY VAMPIRE.

No greater mistake was ever made than the supposition that PUNCHINELLO is to be assailed with impunity by rival publications.  It is well known that he never courted controversies or quarrels, and his best friends understand perfectly his love for a peaceable career.  But when that flippant sheet, known as Rees’s American Encyclopedia, comes out with a violent attack upon PUNCHINELLO’S past life and present course, the assault is such as would provoke a retort from any honest man.  The vile insinuation that PUNCHINELLO is printed and published for the sole purpose of making money out of its subscribers and the reading public in general, is too mendacious for refutation; and when the reckless editor of the periodical in question gravely announces that he can never read PUNCHINELLO without laughing at its contents, it will be readily seen that he goes so far as to make use of the truth to serve his wicked purposes.  But the descent which this shameless conductor of a journal, confessedly the organ of our ignorant masses, has made into the private life of PUNCHINELLO, is without precedent.  He states that for the first fourteen years of his life, PUNCHINELLO was, to all intents and purposes, a person of little or no fortune, and that he depended entirely upon his parents for