A Polish monarch having quitted his companions when he was hunting, his courtiers found him, a few days after, in a market-place, disguised as a porter, and lending out the use of his shoulders for a few pence. At this they were as much surprised as they were doubtful at first whether the _porter_ could be his _majesty_. At length they ventured to express their complaints that so great a personage should debase himself by so vile an employment. His majesty having heard them, replied--"Upon my honour, gentlemen, the load which I quitted is by far heavier than the one you see me carry here: the weightiest is but a straw, when compared to that world under which I laboured. I have slept more in four nights than I have during all my reign. I begin to live, and to be king of myself. Elect whom you choose. For me, who am so well, it were madness to return to _court_." Another Polish king, who succeeded this philosophic _monarchical porter_, when they placed the sceptre in his hand, exclaimed--"I had rather tug at an _oar_!" The vacillating fortunes of the Polish monarchy present several of these anecdotes; their monarchs appear to have frequently been philosophers; and, as the world is made, an excellent philosopher proves but an indifferent king. Two observations on kings were offered to a courtier with great _naïveté_ by that experienced politician, the Duke of Alva:--"Kings who affect to be familiar with their companions make use of _men_ as they do of _oranges_; they take oranges to extract their juice, and when they are well sucked they throw them away. Take care the king does not do the same to you; be careful that he does not read all your thoughts; otherwise he will throw you aside to the back of his chest, as a book of which he has read enough." "The squeezed orange," the King of Prussia applied in his dispute with Voltaire. When it was suggested to Dr. Johnson that kings must be unhappy because they are deprived of the greatest of all satisfactions, easy and unreserved society, he observed that this was an ill-founded notion. "Being a king does not exclude a man from such society. Great kings have always been social. The King of Prussia, the only great king at present (this was THE GREAT Frederic) is very social. Charles the Second, the last king of England who was a man of parts, was social; our Henries and Edwards were all social." The Marquis of Halifax, in his character of Charles II., has exhibited a _trait_ in the royal character of a good-natured monarch; that _trait_, is _sauntering_. I transcribe this curious observation, which introduces us into a levee. "There was as much of laziness as of love in all those hours which he passed amongst his mistresses, who served only to fill up his seraglio, while a bewitching kind of pleasure, called SAUNTERING, was the sultana queen he delighted in.