icy of my present talented and highly disinterested advisers, I
continue to receive from foreign powers assurances of their
amicable disposition towards, and unbounded respect for, my elegant
and enlightened Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and of
their earnest desire to remain on terms of friendship with the rest
of my gifted, liberal, and amiable Cabinet.

The posture of affairs in China is certainly not of the most
pacific character, but I have the assurance of my infallible Privy
Council, and of that profound statesman my Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs, in particular, that the present disagreement
arises entirely from the barbarous character of the Chinese, and
their determined opposition to the progress of temperance in this
happy country.

I have also the satisfaction to inform you, that, by the acute
diplomatic skill of my never-to-be-sufficiently-eulogised Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs, that, after innumerable and
complicated negotiations, he has at length succeeded in seducing
his Majesty the King of the French to render to England the tardy
justice of commemorating, by a _fete_ and inauguration at Boulogne,
the disinclination of the French, at a former period, to invade the
British dominions.

GENTLEMEN OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS,

I have directed the _estimates for the next fortnight_ to be laid
before you, which, I am happy to inform you, will be amply
sufficient for the exigencies of my _present_ disinterested
advisers.

The unequalled fiscal and arithmetical talents of my Chancellor of
the Exchequer have, by the most rigid economy, succeeded in
reducing the revenue very considerably below the actual expenditure
of the state.

MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN,

Measures will be speedily submitted to you for carrying out the
admirable plans of my Secretary of State for the Colonial
Department, and the brilliant author of "Don Carlos," for the
prevention of apoplexy among paupers, and the reduction of the
present extravagant dietary of the Unions.

I have the gratification to announce that a commission is in
progress, by which it is proposed by my _non_-patronage Ministers
to call into requisition the talents of several literary
gentlemen--all intimate friends or relations of my deeply erudite
and profoundly philosophic Secret