quite undreamt of by the
proprietors. I have been a sojourner in almost all of these which are
described as 'situated in picturesque localities.' They are all--it is
in print and must be true--'first-class' hotels; they have most of them
'unrivalled accommodation;' not a few of them have been 'patronised by
Royalty,' and one of them even by 'the Rothschilds.' These last, of
course, are great caravanserais, with 'magnificent ladies'
drawing-rooms' and 'replete' (a word that seems to have taken service
with the licensed victuallers) 'with every luxury.' They make up (a
term unfortunately suggestive of transformation) hundreds of beds; they
have equipages and 'night chamberlains;' '_On y parle francais_;' '_Man
spricht Deutsch_.' Of some of these there is quite a little biography,
beginning with the year of their establishment and narrating their
happy union with other agreeable premises, like a brick and mortar
novel. I remember them well: their 'romantic surroundings' or 'their
exclusive privilege of meeting trains upon the platform;' their
accurate resemblance to 'a gentleman's own house' (with 'a
reception-room 80 feet by 90 feet'); their 'douche and spray baths;'
their 'unexceptionable tariff;' and even their having undergone those
'extensive alterations,' through which I also underwent something,
which they did not allow for in the bill.

These hotels are all more or less satisfactory as to appearance;
furnished, not, indeed, with such taste, nor so lavishly, as their
rivals on the Continent, but handsomely enough; they are much cleaner
than foreign inns; and if their reference to 'every sanitary
improvement which science can suggest' is a little tall, even for an
advertisement, one never has cause to shudder as happens in some places
in France proper and in Brittany everywhere. Though it must be admitted
that _tables d'hote_ abroad are not the banquets which the travelling
Briton believes them to be, our own hotel public dinners are inferior
to their originals, and, what is very hard, those who pay for an
entertainment in private suffer from them. The guest who happens to
dine later than the _table d'hote_ in his own apartment can hardly
escape getting things 'warmed up;' and if he dines at the same time he
has nobody to wait on him. There is one thing that presses with great
severity on paterfamilias--the charge which is made at many of the
large hotels of 1s. 6d. a day for attendance on each person. Half a
guine