What shall I say in excuse for this long letter, which frightens me when I look back upon it? Your Lordship will take it, and all in it, with your usual incomparable temper, which carries you through so much both from enemies and friends. My most humble respects to Lady R., and believe me, with the highest regard, ever, &o. E.B. I hear that Dr. Franklin has had a most extraordinary reception at Paris from all ranks of people. BEACONSFIELD, Monday night, Jan. 6, 1777. ADDRESS TO THE KING. We, your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, several of the peers of the realm, and several members of the House of Commons chosen by the people to represent them in Parliament, do in our individual capacity, but with hearts filled with a warm affection to your Majesty, with a strong attachment to your royal house, and with the most unfeigned devotion to your true interest, beg leave, at this crisis of your affairs, in all humility to approach your royal presence. Whilst we lament the measures adopted by the public councils of the kingdom, we do not mean to question the legal validity of their proceedings. We do not desire to appeal from them to any person whatsoever. We do not dispute the conclusive authority of the bodies in which we have a place over all their members. We know that it is our ordinary duty to submit ourselves to the determinations of the majority in everything, except what regards the just defence of our honor and reputation. But the situation into which the British empire has been brought, and the conduct to which we are reluctantly driven in that situation, we hold ourselves bound by the relation in which we stand both to the crown and the people clearly to explain to your Majesty and our country. We have been called upon in the speech from the throne at the opening of this session of Parliament, in a manner peculiarly marked, singularly emphatical, and from a place from whence anything implying censure falls with no common weight, to concur in unanimous approbation of those measures which have produced our present distresses and threaten us in future with others far more grievous. We trust, therefore, that we shall stand justified in offering to our sovereign and the public our reasons for persevering inflexibly in our uniform dissent from every part of those measures. We lament them from an experience of their mischief, as we originally opposed them from a sure foresight of their unhappy and inevitable tendency.