A LETTER OF ADVICE.
STANDISH FOUR CORNERS, June —, 18—
EDITOR OF PUNCHINELLO:
SIR: I wish to call your attention to certain defects in the journal conducted by you, and to make a few suggestions, which, if followed, will greatly improve it. I have talked with several eminent gentlemen on the subject, among whom are the Rev. EZEKIEL DODGE, pastor of the Sandemanian Church in our town, and also the Hon. PELEG SMITH, our Representative in Congress. Both fully agree with me in the ideas which I am about to lay before you.
In the first place, I object to the name PUNCHINELLO. It is too frivolous, and suggests no food to the thoughtful mind. You should have called your paper the Banner of Progress. This would have at once enlisted the sympathy of all earnest men in your enterprise. Rev. Mr. DODGE says that he wrote to you some weeks ago, proposing that you change the name to that of the Friend of Truth, while Mr. SMITH thinks that the Pig Iron Review would be the best possible name. He is, however, a high tariff man, and his judgment may be influenced by that fact. Either of these latter names would unquestionably be preferable to PUNCHINELLO, but the name which I have suggested is the one which you ought to adopt.
Then the shape of your paper is all wrong. Any one can see that if it were only shorter and broader, it would closely resemble the shape of Punch. Now, sir, we Americans don't want anything that looks like anything British or European. Our country is bigger, and consequently better than any other. We have bigger rivers, bigger cataracts, bigger steamboats, and bigger jimfisks than any other people, and, therefore, our newspapers ought to be original in shape. You should make your paper octagonal in form, otherwise everybody will justly accuse you of imitating some effete and monarchical British journal.
And I must strongly object to the spirit of levity which I find in your paper. This is an Earnest Age, sir, and we cannot afford to joke. The Rev. Mr. DODGE has been greatly grieved at the light way in which you have treated such serious subjects as the Divorce Question. He will forward to you a sermon of his own on the topic of "The Jewish Marriage Law compared with that of the Amalekites and the Jebusites, together with Remarks on the construction of the Ark, including an Inquiry into the origin of the Edomites, and a Dissertation upon the Levitical law of Tithes." This sermon would occupy from four to six pages of your paper every week, if published in weekly instalments, for a period of about ten weeks, and would give a tone to PUNCHINELLO which it now lacks. Besides publishing this sermon, you would do well to print, every week, a speech of the Hon. Mr. DODGE, who is one of the most eloquent members of the House, and whose views on finance are greatly respected by such men as Mr. KELLEY and Mr. CHANDLER.