ridiculous go arm in arm. Here, in England,
we are either gloomily grand, sublimely
stupid, or else squalidly, wretchedly, nakedly
low, paltry, and contemptible. There is not
one flaw in the aristocratic orthodoxy of
Belgrave Square ; but there is not one sound
inch in the rags of Church Lane, St. Giles's.
With us it is either Mivart's or the Clarendon,
and the Blue Pump or the Cadgers'
Arms. But in France, the high and the low,
the gorgeous and the ragged, the blouse and
the embroidered coat, the palace and the
hovel, the bees'-waxed oak and the bare red
tiles, are all mixed in a marvellous and
incongruous salad. Give me the grandest hotel,
the stateliest mansion, that Paris can boast
of, and I will find you, within eyeshot of the
gilt and frescoed saloons, holes and corners
such as we would not lodge an English hound
in. Among appliances of the most exquisitely
advanced civilisation, peeps out a want of
common cleanliness, of common household
ABC. To the waiter, accomplished as a
marquis, succeeds a man to make your fire
and bed, who is not only a boor, but has a
considerable spice of the savage in him. The
carved and bronzed locks drop off for sheer
rottenness; the mother-of-pearl handled
knives won't cut ; the gilded and paneled
doors won't shut ; the whole reminds me of
a stately volume magnificently bound and
embossed, and printed on superfine paper ;
but full of the grossest typographical errors.

This is the great Parisian, and, with very
trifling variations in Italy and Germany, the
great continental hotel; which we are to take
for a model and cynosure in our reform, or
rather revolution, of our own cumbrous,
uncomfortable, expensive, extortionate English
hotels. But I am not retained on either side
as yet. I am neither Rowland, Sergeant, nor
Oliver, Q.C. My task is to portray, not to argue.

There is the second-class Paris Hotel,
scarcely inferior in size to the home of the
Chinese ambassadors; but minus the gilding,
bees'-waxing, and artistic decorations. The
deficiency is amply made up, it must be
admitted, by an additional hundred and fifty
per centum of villanous odours, horrible
uncleanliness, and ignorance of the
rudiments of comfort. The second-class Paris
hotel is the first-class provincial one; and I
say advisedly, and with all the responsibilities
of brevier and long primer on my head, that
in such hotels, in Paris, Marseilles, Rouen,
Bordeaux, Lyons, Amiens, there are landlords
whose notions of soap, water, mops, and flannels,
are not much above those of a half-caste
Indian—the dirtiest specimen of humanity I
can call to mind; whose dinners are villanously
cooked and filthily served, and whose
charges are so exorbitant that the
traveller of imaginative temperament might, by
a trifling exercise of fancy, assume
himself to be in a cave of robbers such as
the Seigneur de Santillane has described and
Salvator Rosa has painted.

The Students' Hotel in Paris is simply a
den. Here, red tiles for flooring revel; here,
a toothbrush would be looked at with about
the same ignorant curiosity as the pocket-
mirror of Pharaoh's daughter. Dirt—genuine,
unadulterate,uninfluenced-by-English-alliance
dirt reigns supreme. Ask any medical
student who has varied his studies at Guy's
or Bartholomew's by an anatomical excursion
to the Clamart. Ask him which he prefers;
Lant Street, Lower East Smithfield, Chiswell
Street, Nassau and Charles Streets, or the
Rue St. Jacques de la Harpe, de l'Ecole de
Médecine, and the Place de l'Odéon?

Boulogne, Calais, Havre, Dieppe, Cherbourg,
being watering-places much in vogue with
pleasure-seekers and invalids both French and
English, have another species of hotels. They
are large roomy, airy, cheerful, elegant; and,
with some exceptions—foremost among them,
the excellent Hôtel des Bains at Boulogne —
intensely uncomfortable. Comfort, to be sure, is
not much wanted under a broiling July sun in
the height of the bathing season; but I can
conceive no more lamentable picture than
that of a chilly English traveller shivering in
one of the dear big bedrooms of an Hôtel
de la Couronne; a room pierced with
doors everywhere save where it is pierced by
windows; the walls papered in a pattern
resembling one of Mr. Albert Smith's own
Mont Blanc placards—all icicles and
snowdrops; the waves howling outside like an ogre
for the blood of those that go down to the
sea in ships; the searching wind peering
into every nook, and cranny, and crevice,
like a custom-house officer, or a raven, or an
ape.

Of the purely English hotel abroad, the less
said, I think, the better. The worst features
of the continental system are grafted upon
the worst features of the English; the cheapest
foreign things are charged for at the dearest
home rates; and the result is, the enriching of
the knave, and the despair of the dupe. You
have, to be sure, the consolation of being
swindled in your own language by your own
countrymen, and of being bitten into frenzy by
vermin that may, haply, have crossed the
Channel in British blankets. You have also
an opportunity of witnessing how kindly the
rascality of dear old England will flourish on
a foreign soil; how a dirty, inattentive, clumsy,
uncivil English waiter will put forth stronger
blossoms of those desirable qualities abroad;
and you are initiated into quite a new phase
of the mysteries of foreign exchanges by
learning that an English sovereign is worth
about fifteen francs French money, and an
English shilling somewhere bordering on
ninepence halfpenny.

I have been thus prolix, and perhaps prosy,
on the theme of French hotels, because in
their chiefest features they are identical with
the hotels of the other parts of Europe. But
this survey is cosmopolitan, and must not be
confined to one country.