of marble, fresco-painting, and fluted columns ;
there are, almost everywhere, the elements
of grandeur, luxury, and artistic taste.

Gaetano Montepietà is the landlord of the
Casa Borbonica. He was a Colonel in the army
of Italy, under Beauharnais originally (surely
those Italian colonels are only approached,
numerically, by the American militia-
generals); then he was Lord Scamperlaud's
courier; then he kept the Hôtel des Etrangers
in Little Nick Street, Leicester Square,
London; and, realising a handsome competency
in that cosmopolitan but unsavoury
locality, returned to his native land, and
invested his savings in the hotel which you see.
In the great traveller's book you are at
liberty to register your opinions and impressions
for and against the comfort, cheapness,
and convenience of the Casa Borbonica. Be
just, and write with a firm hand that in summer
weather the rooms are delightful; that
—the smell of decayed melons and warmed
up maccaroni apart—it is very pleasant to
have the run of a vast, gaily-decorated
palace amid orange-flowers and bubbling
fountains; that the blue sky is glorious through
the casements, and the shade of the lofty walls
delightful in the noontide to smoke cigars
and drink lemonade in; that ice-eating in
the garden by moonlight is delicious; that
almost every article is really exceedingly
cheap (unless, indeed, you are known to be a
milord, when you are swindled on the ground
that you are accustomed to, and like it) that
even if you are notoriously wealthy and
liberal, the rent of the malachite and
gold, or of the ivory and black velvet suite,
lags far behind the jocundly extortionate
price which you have to pay for a first-floor
in the Rue de la Paix, or a garret in Pall
Mall; that the waiters are civil, obliging,
quick-witted, and grateful; and that the cooking,
though decidedly oily, and not over neat,
is substantial and succulent. But here
you must stop. Commendation can go no
further. You have been just; now be candid.
Put down in burning characters that Gaetano
Montepietà is a humbug; a cringing, insolent
(when he dares), hypocritical, unveracious
son of a Lombardian keeper of hogs. I will
not say that he is a Rornan—no; he is not
quite so great a scoundrel as that; but the
Emperor of Austria has very few more
finished humbugs among his Italian subjects.
I am aware of you, mio amico Gaetano. I
have been up to your little game for a long
time. I know how you pop down in my
bill lire and soldi for sugar I have never
eaten, and wax candles I have never burnt.
I know how, when I breakfast out, you slily
mulct me in two breakfasts instead of one, as
a warning and a punishment. You are own
brother, O Gaetano, to the widow Fizzicatti,
who keeps the furnished lodgings in the
Strada Smifferata (she has cousins in Camden
Town), who makes me sign a list of furniture,
crockery, et cetera, supposed to be in
her abominable chambers, when I take them
by the month, and brings me in a bill, long,
venomous, and tortuous as a serpent, when I
leave, for jugs I have broken and never saw,
and tablecloths I have inked and never
heard of.

Gaetano and his wax candles: to listen to
the honest Mont Blanc chronicler, one
would think the candle grievance was
exclusively confined to England. Why, the whole
Continent cries out against them. You pay
but seventy-five cents a-piece for them, to be
sure; but you are made to burn or to pay
for myriads of them. Bougie, bougie, bougie,
—bougie here, bougie there, and bougie
everywhere—take your old hotel bills out of
your trunk and add up the amount of
francs, lire, florins, or carlini, candles have
cost you; and you will find that you might
have had an exhibition of fireworks all
to yourself every autumn, and have been
economical. I think continental hotel-keepers
and waiters feel a savage pleasure in bringing
you fresh wax-candles, as I am certain
they do in winter time, in cramming your
cupboard with new supplies of logs and
faggots. I have often, during a bougie
nightmare, fancied a congress of waiters in
the corridor, dancing a wild saraband, and
singing an atrocious carmagnole till the
scene changed to a patent candle factory, and
candles and waiters whirled off in a wild
Sahara waltz into infinite space.

Lift not your pen also from the travellers'-
book (stern candour demands it) till you
have recorded this,—that there never was an
Italian hotel that was clean or sweet-smelling.
That those at Venice in particular
rejoice in an odour that makes you sick,
giddy, and bilious; a smell of which it can
with little exaggeration be said, as of some
London fogs, that you could cut it with a
knife. Set down also, in a firm Roman hand
that the rooms are awfully damp, and in cold
weather afflicted with distracting, gusty,
piercing draughts; and that after every shower
of rain, the grand frescoed saloons are pervaded
by sundry unwelcome visitants from the
gardens—not to say reptiles, of the most hideous
coleopteric descriptions; which crawl, and
wriggle, and buzz, and fly, and leap, and
shake their hundred legs over your clothes and
food till you are blind and mad. Tell the truth,
and acknowledge that with all the malachite
and gold, Aurora frescoes, scagliola staircases,
and romantic Cinquantapercento
reminiscences, the grand Italian hotel is but a
seedy, poverty-stricken, dilapidated, tumble-
down, vermin-haunted, quasi-rotten institution
after all.

In Rome, there is a special hotel which
appears to lie fallow during fifty-one weeks in the
year, and suddenly to start up into life, with
a teeming crop of guests, in Holy Week. Then,
and for the succeeding days of the carnival,
the Romans going stark staring mad, invite
all the sight-seers of the world who have