money and leisure to cross the Alps to play
with them. They make a Guy of the poor old
pope; they spoil their clothes with wax-
candle droppings in the chapels; they crush
each others' toes, ribs, fans, and hats, in
their struggles to see the losel pilgrims'
feet washed; they scream, and jostle and
bribe chamberlains, and run broken-kneed
horses in the Corso, and dress themselves
up in masquerade costumes, and pelt each
other with chalken and plaster of Paris
abominations, and tell Christendom that they
are celebrating a great religious festival.
Now it is that the special hotel becomes
manifest. Nobody heard of the Hotel
del Matto Forestiere, or of the Madonna di
Scarlatina, since last carnival; but now,
sallow commissioners rampage about Rome
lauding the unrivalled accommodations of
these hotels. Whole English families, who
have been unable to obtain rooms in the
Piazza di Spagna or Del Popolo are hustled
almost involuntarily into atrocious Bug-
parks in remote quarters of the city. Principi
Inglesi find themselves dwelling among the
Trasteverini; and travelling archdeacons are
pent up in outhouses among mouldy old
convents and churches and seminaries, where
the Scarlet Lady rides rampant. To be sure,
to obtain a bed at all in Holy week is very
nearly as dear and difficult as to secure a
cardinal's hat. The prices quoted are
fabulous. Romantic stories are told of the
wonderful substitutes for bedsteads which
travellers have been obliged to put up with;
of how Sir Newport Pagnell, Bart., and
family occupied a detached building formerly
the residence of some four-legged, curly-tailed
animals of the porcine persuasion, which had
been removed to better lodgings; how Captain
and Mrs. Gunwale had paid five dollars a
day for a cockloft; how one of the three
hundred and seventy Prince Galitzins in the
peerage of Russia was sojourning in a wood-
cellar; and how young Rougebox of the
Florentine legation slept two nights in a
well, and one on a staircase. The Beppos,
Francescos, Luigis, and Tommasos who
conduct these special houses of entertainment
clear profits, while the excitement lasts, of
about six hundred per cent.; but their
prosperity is as transitory as that of Cowes
landladies in regatta time, or of lodging-house
keepers in an assize town when there is a good
murder case to be tried. For the rest of the
year, nobody hears anything more of the
Matto Forestiere or the Scarlatina; and the
Beppos and Francescos may, for aught I
know, earn a livelihood in sitting as models
for the painters, grinding hurdy-gurdies, or
goading buffaloes.

Country Italian hotels are not much removed,
I fancy, from the likeness of that renowned
inn at Terracina, where the Englishman met
the fair Venetian, and had afterwards the
adventure with the brigand. There are five
metropoli : Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples,
and Milan. I will throw in Genoa, to make
up the half-dozen; so say (and I give a margin
of two digits) twelve good hotels in all. The
provincial ones are simply execrable, for the
simple reason that they are not patronised
by continuous relays of strangers. Who
stops, longer than he can help, in a small
Italian town? We scamper from capital to
capital, charging through galleries and
museums in a Cossack fashion, seeing a
thousand pictures and statues, remembering,
perhaps, a score, and understanding, very
often, not one. Some day, very likely, the
small towns will be opened up by railways,
and we shall have good hotels in them.

I have two additional remarks to make on
Italian hotels, and I have done with the
boot-shaped peninsula. Imprimis,—about
Naples. In that delightful city the hotel-
dweller may enjoy a lively but expensive
gratification over and above all the pleasures of
the sea, the sky, and the table-d'hôte. The
gratification (which is not charged for in the
bill,) consists in being robbed—I don't say
by the waiters—I don't say by anybody in particular
—but I think by every man, woman and
child, who can gain access to your apartment,
your pocket, your trunks, or your generous
feeling. From the coachman who drives you
to your hotel, to the waiter who bows you from
it, be assured every mother's son has
something about him which belongs not to him,
but to you. It matters little what they
steal, a pocket-handkerchief or a purse of
gold. It matters less who is the thief, the
heir apparent, or the lowest Lazzaroni of the
Quai Santa Lucia—robbers there must and
robbed you must be. I don't know what the
Neapolitans will do between their hang-dog
government and the threatened extinction of
Vesuvius. Honest men won't come under
the sway of the glorious, generous king, and
sight-seers won't go to see Naples if there be no
burning mountain. Fancy three hundred and
fifty thousand thieves with nothing to steal!
A pitiable case, indeed. They will die of grief;
and I did once hear of a waiter at a Neapolitan
hotel who was found by an Englishman
sitting on the staircase, and weeping bitterly;
and, being asked the cause of his sorrow,
answered, amid heartrending sobs,
—the signor is unjust, the signor is
ungenerous, the signor performs not his duty
towards men. He locks up all his drawers,
and leaves not a rag about, and one cannot
steal the value of a carlino from him.

What do I know about Spanish hotels?—
nothing. I might, indeed, conjure up an
unsubstantial word-picture about omelets, oil, garlic,
puchero, funcions, muleteers, gregos, slouched-
hats, and swarthy dons laying down their
cigarillas to eat their soup, and resuming
them while waiting for their olla-podrida. I
might fill in a back-ground with Señora Perea
Nena dancing, while Señor Alfonzo Ruiz
plays lithely on the castanets, or with Don
Quixote charging the windmill, or Dorothea