The dexterity of a quack doctor at a fair made of Peter the Great his own fool, when the humour took him to play the character. The Czar had seen the fellow, on a platform, skilfully pushing out teeth with the end of a ladle, or picking them out with the point of a dagger. Peter paid for instruction in the art, and forthwith began to practise it on his courtiers, whose teeth were never safe within their lips. It happened on one occasion that a Russian officer had exposed himself to the Czar’s wrath, by being absent from a post at which Peter had especially placed him. It was necessary that the offender should meet his enraged sovereign, and his friends gave him up for lost, when he entered the audience chamber. But the officer, as he crossed the threshold, pulled out his handkerchief, pressed it to his cheek, and advanced towards the Czar with a growl of agony. Peter, delighted at the prospect of a patient, pushed him into a chair; the officer opened wide his jaws, and the Czar tugged at his gums with a fury that made the sufferer roar as if he had been under the knout, but which was attended by the extraction of two useful and stupendous grinders. Peter looked at the teeth, and then at his patient, whose lips were still open with pain and discoloured by blood. The Imperial surgeon laughed and danced with delight; but looking in the face of the officer, his own darkened with rage, on recognizing the offender. The latter, shuddering at the look, sank back in his chair and opened his jaws wider, indicative of another offering from the same source. What could the amateur dentist do? He laughed louder, danced more wildly with ecstasy, pulled out another tooth, and dismissed the crafty but clever patient, with full pardon. The Czarina Elizabeth, in a milder form it is true, suffered also under this malady of folly. This lady’s delight was, never to sign any document brought to her by her ministers, till she had worn them out by her refusals. When the Grand Chancellor Besterfchef laid before her a paper which required her name at the bottom of it in order to give it validity, she would toss the pen across the room, begin dancing round the minister, who turned upon his knees to meet her face and to implore her, with tears in his eyes, to cease from such folly. The Czarina only danced on, laughing the more immoderately as she observed the embarrassment and the tears of the Chancellor. The latter however seldom left her till he had made her ashamed of playing the fool, and of interrupting public business by refusing to scrawl her name to a state paper. At a semi-barbarous court like that of Russia, the above traits are not very surprising. At that of Spain, which boasted so loudly of its solemn grandeur, dignity, and refinement, we find a more surprising instance, but quite different from that I have mentioned of the Princess of the Asturias.