The Virginia Gazette

Description and character of the King of Poland.

He is about five feet ten inches high, erectly well made, and remarkably graceful and showy in the formation of his chest, and the fall of his shoulders; his hair is dark, his eyes large, black, and piercing, his complexion olive, his nose rather aquiline, and his whole countenance has in it a pleasing, serene melancholy, but when he speaks it opens into something inexpressibly sweet, interesting, and rather cheerful; his voice is distinct, clear, and melodiously manly.

The education which he received from his father (the confidante of Charles the XIIth, and really an extraordinary genius) was a most sensible one, and the success has corresponded with the plan. He is a complete master of Latin, and four or five modern languages, French, German, Italian, and English; in the two former he is not only equally fluent with the most classical natives of those countries, but he is astonishingly eloquent. In Italian and English (though he converses with great propriety and exactness) from want of practice, he has not the same facility of expression.

His reading is very extensive; but his inclinations have led him principally to the belles letters, or polite literature, in which he includes the great historians and orators of Greece and Rome. For poetry he has an enthusiastic passion, and (what perhaps is the criterion of every man's taste and feeling) our SHAKESPEARE is the chief object of his adoration. From his intimacy with the great writers of antiquity, as Xenophon, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, and some of the most illustrious of these latter ages, as Sydney, Montesquieu, and Beccaria, he has strengthened the notions (before dictated by the happy temperature of his nature) on the rights of mankind in gross, of the obligations which the governing part, or Magistrates (whatever titles they bear), are under to make the welfare and prosperity of the great aggregate their principal, their only object; and though it may, perhaps, with some propriety, be said, that these his noble sentiments have hastened the explosion of those clouds which have been long gathering over his country, it can never be said that any deficiency of head or heart has given rise to them.