t is more
important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed
vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate,
tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper
or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice,
would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for
the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their
commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management
might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like,
with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in
white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for
their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure
of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be
marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree
intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that
the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was
not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well
have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he
cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest hotels
in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical
acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority of his
paying guests than some such authority, for they could wish nothing so
much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the example of the real
characters in the social drama which they were impersonating. They had
the stage and the scenery; they had spared no expense in their
costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and for the space of
their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of aristocratic
society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. After
that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra of another
theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of their colossal
columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour when they shone
primarily just like the paying guests in the finest English hotel, and
secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable dinners
of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private houses in London.

Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing lower
than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question which
we have