SENATE.
ction in Congress has not been very lively of late. It is Lent; and the exhilarating sort of entertainment provided by the "high requiem" of a SUMNER, or the wild warbling of a DRAKE, is considered to be unseasonable. The Senate is not a faster, though Senator SUMMER'S tongue goes faster than any body else's in it; nor yet a prayer, though Senator YATES is undeniably Prairie in his oratory; but it is a humiliation. As Lord ASHBURNHAM well remarked when he saw it in its fresh hey-day, we may repeat in its old salt-hay-day, "'Pon mee sole, uno, it is a pudding-headed lot of duffers."
PUNCHINELLO finds nothing to make his weekly abstract and brief chronicle of this asylum for elderly and uninteresting lunatics about without making it too weakly. In the language of Bishop POTTER, when asked by the Rev. Dr. DIX what he would do in the event of a heart turning up, "I'll pass" to—
THE HOUSE,
which never fails to amuse and instruct. Mr. COX has been making a shocking speech about the tariff. Mr. COX remarked that he once thought there was nothing like it. But I have been travelling about since, he said, with a summer-mote in my own buck eye in search of Winter Sunbeams in my Corsican brother's. I have been in Corsica, and of Corsican find a parallel of the latitude of this tariff in the leg ends of the robbers, by which I do not mean the ankles of the Forty Thieves, whom I had the pleasure of seeing in company with my "constituents of the Sixth Congressional District of the City of New-York. " Well, then, there was a robber in Corsica of the name of PELEG HIGGINS, who found that his business in the Robbin Rednest line was suffering from the opposition of several other robbers in the neighbor and robbin' hood, who "went through" his victims, to use an expressive phrase common among my constituents, before he had his chance. PELEG thereupon went to the priest of the parish, who assessed the sins of the robbers of that vicinity, and offered him half the proceeds of his future crimes if he would increase his tariff of penances on the opposition firms. The priest drew up a schedule of the Whole Duties of Man. It was practically prohibitory on murders, and robberies were assessed from sixty to eighty per cent ad valorem. The other robbers remonstrated. The priest said he would protect his parishioners. PELEG is now very much respected, and owns an iron and log rolling establishment. The other robbers were driven out of the business. That, Mr. COX said, was the origin of the Protective Tariff.
Mr. KELLEY wished to know how much British Gold Mr. COX had received for his infamous harangue. As for him, he was bound to protect his constituents (Mr. COX, "Parishioners;" and laughter on the Democratic, or other, side of Mr. KELLEY'S mouth.) As to the charge that he was behind the age, it was absurd. Every Philadelphian knew that nobody could be behind the Age. He advocated the principle expressed by the Pennsylvanian bard,
You tickle me and
I'll tickle you.
Mr. LOGAN said the army ought to be reduced; and he treated with scorn General SHERMAN'S intimation that it ought not to be reduced. General SHERMAN had once told him that there was a Major-General whom the army could spare. He (LOGAN) was a Major-General at the time. He did not know whom General SHERMAN meant. He did not see the use of the regular army, or of West-Point. In his State a man could get along just as well without knowing any thing; and what was the sense of teaching officers? The more they knew, the more they wanted to know. Give them an inch, and they would take an ell. He didn't know what an ell an ell was, and he didn't want to. He was willing to provide a staff, but not a crutch.
Mr. SLOCUM said he hoped it was not unparliamentary to observe that the gentleman who preceded him didn't know what he was talking about. The French staff is larger than our staff. So is the British United Service Club. So is the Irish shillelagh. If the reductions proposed were carried "out," the staff would stick at nothing. The arms of the service might get on without a staff, but how about the legs.