_Monarchs I Have Met_, by BEATTY KINGSTON (CHAPMAN & HALL), is a title which recalls the old story in SMITH'S _Irish Diamonds_, and reproduced in another form by CHARLES LEVER, of the little crossing-sweeper who ran home to his mother and recounted how he had met WILLIAM THE FOURTH. "Mother, sure I've met the King this mornin'! An' he spoke to me!!" "Did he now? Bless his Majesty! An' what might the King have said to yez, PATSY?" "What did he say to me, is it? Sure, he said, 'Get out of the way, ye dirty little blackguard!'" Not that the Monarchs were so rude to Mr. BEATTY KINGSTON, whose entertaining society was rather thrust on the Monarchs by his employers than sought by the Royal Personages themselves. If Mr. KINGSTON was entertaining in one sense, so were the Monarchs in another. The first volume is especially festive. Within the first 183 pages there is more eating and drinking than in any other book I can call to mind since _Pickwick_. These pages must be not only read, but well digested. The writer congratulates himself on "not having let anything escape him;" and certainly nothing eatable or drinkable seems to have done so. He seems to be always smacking his lips over reminiscences of the savory and the succulent--"Savory and More" should be his motto--and it is sad to record that apparently--but I trust I am mistaken in my deduction--he glories in iced champagne, which is rank heresy, and an abomination to the true epicure. His stories are told in an amusing, rough-and-ready, barrack-like, swaggery-Germany-soldiery style; and _rien n'est sacré pour un sapeur_. He witnesses the ceremony of anointing the King of Hungary, and describes the function as the Primate "oiling" his Majesty, as if the latter were having his locks Macassar'd, and the Archbishop were the hair-dresser. Mr. BEATTY KINGSTON, according to the Book of B. K., or "the B. of B. K.," seems to have been generally entertained in the "most sumptuous manner" wherever he went in Germany and Hungary--he is very German, and always very Hung'ry--and writes of his sojourn in these countries with a full heart. Then, in the second volume, he finds himself in Rome, where there was "nothing fit to eat," "food bad," "cookery abominable, and the wine worst of all." If the perusal of the first part of the B. of B. K. causes many a mouth to water, his wretched plight in the second will draw tears from the eyes of the least sympathetic. He complains,--indeed, it is his first and most important grievance,--"_Imprimis_, there was not a bit of clear ice to be had in the Eternal City. Whatever liquid was cooled at all had to be inserted in salt snow." What a cruel hardship for any man to bear, especially a rollicking epicure who revels in "Roederer _carte blanche_ of Alpine coldness." However, there was a good deal for him to swallow in Rome, and for lack of better food, he seems to have taken it in with all the alacrity of a dutiful Special with an appetite for gossip.