Britain are famous for their high charges, their
badly-kept rooms, and loathsome cooking; let me add, their warm welcome.
In the reign of Edward III. there was legislation on the subject. The
colder and cheaper hospitality of the Continent strikes a chill, I am
sometimes told by those familiar with both. The hotel selected by a
certain Mrs. Rita Marsh was no exception to the ordinary English
caravanserai. It was 'replete with every comfort.' The garden contained
an _oubliette_, down which Mrs. Marsh, while walking in the evening,
inadvertently fell. On the Continent the _oubliettes_ are inside the
house, and you are ostentatiously warned of their immediate
neighbourhood. These things are managed better in France, if I may say
so without offending Tariff Reformers.

The accident disfigured Mrs. Marsh for life; and for the loss of unusual
personal attractions an English jury awarded her only 500_l_. The judge
made a joke about it. Mr. Gill was very playful about her photograph,
and every one, except, I imagine, Mrs. Marsh, seems to have been
satisfied that ample justice was done. The hotel proprietors did not
press their counter-claim for a bill of 191_l_.! Chivalrous fellows!
Still, I can safely say that in France Mrs. Marsh would have been awarded
at least four times that amount; though if she had been murdered the
proprietors would have only been fined forty francs. But beauty to its
fortunate possessors is more valuable than life itself, and the story is
to me one of the most pathetic I have ever heard. To the English mind
there is something irresistibly comic when any one falls, morally or
physically. It is the basis of English Farce. Jokes made about those
who have never fallen, 'too great to appease, too high to appal,' are
voted bad taste. Caricaturists of the mildest order are considered
irreligious and vulgar if they burlesque, say, the Archbishop of
Canterbury for example; or unpatriotic if they hint that Lord Roberts did
not really finish the Boer War when he professed to have done so. After
Parnell came to grief I remember the Drury Lane pantomime was full of
fire-escapes, and every allusion to the _cause celebre_ produced roars of
laughter. Mr. Justice Bigham was only a thorough Englishman when he
gently rallied the jury for awarding, as he obviously thought, excessive
damages. So little is beauty esteemed in England.

The case of Miss Browne was also singular. She left a trust fund 'for