the public
and private rooms of our hotels are far more cheerful and better
appointed than they used to be, and instead of the four-posters there
are French beds. The one great advantage that our new system possesses
over the old is, indeed, the sleeping accommodation. The 'skimpy'
mattress, the sheet that used to come untucked through shortness,
leaving the feet tickled by the blanket, and the thin, limp thing that
called itself a feather bed, are only to be found in ancient
hostelries.

On the other hand, it must be confessed that the food has deteriorated;
the bill of fare, indeed, is more pretentious, but the materials are
inferior, and so is the cooking. The well-browned fowl, with its rich
gravy and the bread-sauce that used to be its homely but agreeable
attendant, has disappeared. The bird appears now under a French title,
and is in other respects unrecognisable; as an Irish gentleman once
explained it to me, it is not only that the thing appears under an
_alias_, but the _alias_ comes up instead of the thing. There is one
essential which the old hotel often omitted to serve with your chicken,
and which the new hotel supplies--the salad. This, however, few hotel
cooks in England--and far less hotel waiters--can be trusted to
prepare. Their simple plan is to deluge the tender lettuce with some
hateful ingredient called 'salad mixture,' poured out of a peculiarly
shaped bottle, such as the law now compels poisons to be sold in; and
the jewel is deserving of its casket--it is almost poison. Nor, alas!
is security always to be attained by making one's salad for one's self.
For supposing even that the lettuce is fresh and white, and not
manifestly a cabbage that is pretending to be a lettuce, how about the
oil? Charles Dickens used to say that he could always tell the
character of an inn from its cruets; if they were dirty and neglected,
all was bad. The cruets are now clean enough in all hotels of
pretension; but alas for that bottle which should contain (and perhaps
did at some remote period contain) the oil of Lucca! On the fingers of
one hand I could count all the hotels in England which have not given
me bad oil. Whether it was never good, or whether it has gone bad, I
leave to those philosophers who investigate the origin of evil. I only
know that it tastes as hair-oil smells. As to the soups, they are no
worse than they used to be, and no better; there is soup and there is
hotel soup.

'Gravy soup, fried s