"My Lords and Gentlemen;
"Deeply as I regret that the machinations and designs of the disaffected should have led in some parts of the country to acts of open violence and insurrection, I cannot but express my satisfaction at the promptitude with which those attempts have been suppressed by the vigilance and activity of the magistrates, and by the zealous co-operation of all those of my subjects, whose exertions have been called forth to support the authority of the laws.
"The wisdom and firmness manifested by the late parliament, and the due execution of the laws, have greatly contributed to restore confidence throughout the kingdom, and to discountenance those principles of sedition and irreligion which had been disseminated with such malignant perseverance, and had poisoned the minds of the ignorant and unwary.
"I rely upon the continued support of parliament in my determination to maintain, by all the means intrusted to my hands, the public safety and tranquillity.
"Deploring, as we all must, the distress which still unhappily prevails among many of the labouring classes of the community, and anxiously looking forward to its removal or mitigation, it is in the meantime our common duty effectually to protect the loyal, the peaceable, and the industrious, against those practices of turbulence and intimidation by which the period of relief can only be deferred, and by which the pressure of the distress has been incalculably aggravated.
"I trust, that an awakened sense of the dangers which they have incurred, and of the arts which have been employed to seduce them, will bring back by far the greater part of those who have been unhappily led astray, and will revive in them that spirit of loyalty, that due submission to the laws, and that attachment to the constitution, which subsist unabated in the hearts of the great body of the people, and which, under the blessing of Divine Providence, have secured to the British nation the enjoyment of a larger share of practical freedom, as well as of prosperity and happiness, than have fallen to the lot of any nation in the world."
[THE CHARACTER OF "JOHN BULL" (1820).]
Source.—Washington Irving's Sketch Book. Pp. 237-239. Bohn's Libraries. G. Bell & Sons, London.
What is worst of all, is the effect which these pecuniary embarrassments and domestic feuds have had on the poor man himself. Instead of that jolly round corporation, and snug rosy face, which he used to present, he has of late become as shrivelled and shrunk as a frost-bitten apple. His scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, which bellied out so bravely in those prosperous days when he sailed before the wind, now hangs loosely about him like a mainsail in a calm. His leather breeches are all in folds and wrinkles, and apparently have much ado to hold up the boots that yawn on both sides of his once sturdy legs.