on for well-aired sheets, setting
fire so incessantly to public premises as to raise the rate of insurance
to a ruinous height, and thus bring bankruptcy on all the principal
establishments in Great Britain. But shutting our eyes, for a moment,
to such general conflagration and bankruptcy, and indulging ourselves in
the violent supposition that some inns might still continue to exist,
think, O think, worthy Doctor, to what other fatal results this system,
if universally acted upon, would, in a very few years of the transitory
life of man, inevitably lead! In the first place, in a country where all
travellers carried with them their own sheets, none would be kept in
inns except for the use of the establishment's own members. This would
be inflicting a vital blow, indeed, on the inns of a country. For mark,
in the second place, that the blankets would not be long of following
the sheets. The blankets would soon fly after the sheets on the wings of
love and despair. Thirdly, are you so ignorant, Doctor, of this world
and its ways, as not to see that the bed-steads would, in the twinkling
of an eye, follow the blankets? What a wild, desolate, wintry appearance
would a bedroom then exhibit!

The foresight of such consequences as these may well make a man shudder.
We have no objections, however, to suffer the Doctor himself, and a few
other occasional damp-dreading old quizzes, "to see the bed-clothes put
to the fire in their presence," merely at the expense of subjugating
themselves to the derision of all the chambermaids, cooks, scullions,
boots, ostlers, and painters. (The painter is the artist who is employed
in inns, to paint the buttered toast. He always works in oils. As the
Director-General would say--he deals in buttery touches.) Their feverish
and restless anxiety about sheets, and their agitated discourse on damps
and deaths, hold them up to vulgar eyes in the light of lunatics. They
become the groundwork of practical jokes--perhaps are bitten to death by
fleas; for a chambermaid, of a disposition naturally witty and cruel,
has a dangerous power put into her hands, in the charge of blankets. The
Doctor's whole soul and body are wrapt up in well-aired sheets; but the
insidious Abigail, tormented by his flustering, becomes in turn the
tormentor--and selecting the yellowest, dingiest, and dirtiest pair of
blankets to be found throughout the whole gallery of garrets (those for
years past used by long-bearded old-clothes