Sir,--I had the honor of addressing you on the 17th. Since which I have received yours of the 13th. I enclose you extracts from letters received from Mr. Short. In one of the 7th of February, Mr. Short informs me that he has received a letter from M. de Montmorin, announcing to him that the King has named Ternant his minister here. The questions on our tobacco and oil have taken unfavorable turns. The former will pay fifty livres the thousand weight less, when carried in French than foreign bottoms. Oil is to pay twelve livres a kental, which amounts to a prohibition of the common oils, the only kind carried there. Tobacco will not feel the effect of these measures till time will be given to bring it to rights. They had only twenty thousand hogsheads in the kingdom in November last, and they consume two thousand hogsheads a month, so that they must immediately come forward and make great purchases, and not having as yet vessels of their own to carry it, they must pay the extra duties on ours. I have been puzzled about the delays required by Mr. Barclay's affairs. He gives me reason to be tolerably assured, that he will go in the first vessel which shall sail after the last day of May. There is no vessel at present whose destination would suit. Believing that even with this, we shall get the business done sooner than through any other channel, I have thought it best not to change the plan. The last Leyden gazettes give us what would have been the first object of the British arms, had the rupture with Spain taken place. You know that Admiral Cornish had sailed on an unknown destination before the Convention was received in London. Immediately on its receipt, they sent an express after him to Madeira, in hopes of finding him there. He was gone, and had so short a passage, that in twenty-three days he had arrived in Barbadoes, the general rendezvous. All the troops of the islands were collecting there, and General Matthews was on his way from Antigua to take command of the land operations, when he met with the packet-boat which carried the counter-orders. Trinidad was the object of the expedition. Matthews returned to Antigua, and Cornish is arrived in England. This island, at the mouth of the Oronoko, is admirably suited for a lodgment from which all the country up that river, and all the northern coast of South America, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese, may be suddenly assailed.