world his travelling experiences; yet I am
of opinion that there are some few things
we can manage in our own way, and in our
own land, with no indifferent success, and
in whose management we need not cede to
our continental neighbours.

I will first put up at Jalabert's first-class
inn.

Jalabert's is designed for the accommodation
of The Superior Classes.  What free-born
Briton's frame is free from a tingle of
respect, admiration, pride, when he hears
the term Superior Classes?  That a duke,
a lord, a baronet, a bishop—a superior class
man, in a word—should be content to leave
the Assyrian magnificence of his halt-dozen
town and country palaces even for a season,
and put up at a mere hotel, is in itself an
act of such condescension and abnegation of
self, that the least we can do is to have a
Jalabert's to receive him, and that it should
be well and universally understood that
Jalabert's is devoted to the reception of the
superior classes, and of those only—not of
the profanum vulgus.

Now Jalabert's, the great London hotel for
the superior classes, is situated in Purple
Street, Flaxen Square; which, as all men
know, is within two hundred and fifty miles
of Old Bond Street.  It was originally an
old, cooped-up, inconvenient, George the
Second House, which was the bachelor
residence of the well-known Claribel Claribel,
Esquire, a great friend of Sir Charles
Hanbury Williams, a member of parliament for
my Lord Mintoncomyn's borough of Heeltap,
and assistant Commissioner of Lunacy for the
liberty of St. Kits—which last snug little
sinecure brought him in just nineteen hundred
pounds a-year.  On the lamented demise of
Mr. Claribel, which occurred one day, in
consequence of a surfeit of mushroom patties and
Maraschino, as he was stepping into his chair
at White's, after winning a few hundreds at
E. O. of Mr. Selwyn; his mansion in Purple
Street became the property, by testamentary
bequest, of the Sieur Dominique Jalabert,
formerly of the Canton des Grisons, his attached
hairdresser and valet-de-chambre.  Dominique
turned the place into an hotel, and prospered
exceedingly.  Although a foreigner, he manifested
a decided predilection for guests of the
English nation; and, at the epoch of the Great
French Revolution and emigration, discouraged
the patronage of the superior classes of
the continent.  He made an exception,
indeed, in favour of the Prince Trufflebert de
Perigord Dindon, who had adroitly escaped
from France before the confiscation, had sold
all his estates for cash, and had brought
away all the family jewels sewn up in his
wife's brocades.  Of the friendship and
countenance of this noble émigré Jalabert
constantly boasted.  He would have been glad
for him to stay years in his hotel, because
the most elevated members of the British
aristocracy condescended to play hazard with
the prince; nevertheless Jalabert seized the
boxes of the Cardinal Duke de Rohan
Chambertin for the amount of his bill,
and locked up poor Monsieur le Chevalier de
Rastificolis in the Marshalsea for a similar
reason.

At the peace of eighteen hundred and fourteen,
however, a sudden change came over the
spirit of Dominique Jalabert's dream.  He
suddenly conceived a profound and
enthusiastic affection for foreigners—superior
foreigners.  He was proud to accommodate
allied sovereigns.  He doated on ambassadors.
A Hetman of the Don Cossacks was his
delight.  Not a strong politician ordinarily, he
believed fanatically in the Holy Alliance; and
his fanaticism culminated into idolatry when
a Holy Ally travelled with a large suite, and
sent a courier on before him to order a suite
of apartments.

It was at this time that Dominique bought
the freehold of Lord Pyepoodle's house, next
door to the right; subsequently adding to it,
to meet his increasing hotel requirements,
old Mr. Pillardollar the banker's house, next
door to the left, and lastly, the roomy
mansion of Lord Chief Justice Trippletree
(afterwards raised to the peerage under the title
of Baron Hempshire) round the corner.
The original Jalabert died immensely rich,
about five and twenty years ago.  Latterly he
wore a wig and a shirt-frill, and was quite a
respectable man; indeed it is said that he
never recovered the shock of the death of the
Emperor Alexander.  His son, Castlereagh
Pitt Jalabert, Esq., lives at a park in Somersetshire,
rides to hounds, and is high sheriff.
I should not at all wonder if the next heir
were created a baronet, and the family name
Anglicised into Jollybird.

Messrs. Salt and Savoury are the present
proprietors of Jalabert's.  S. and S. are also
landlords of the F. M. Prince Albert, close to
the North Polar Railway Station; the Grand
Pagoda Hotel (formerly the Brown George)
at Brighton; the Mulligatawny House, at
Cheltenham; the Benbow and Badminton at
Greenwich; and the Kehama Hotel, at
Windermere.  Salt and Savoury belong to the
great consular hotel-keeping families, who
have their caravanserais all over England,
and whose names there should be a Sir
Bernard Burke to register.  Jalabert's, their great
London hotel, has grown from Claribel Claribel's
two-storeyed hencoop-looking bachelor
residence, into an immense establishment.
It is six houses rolled into one.  The streets
on which it looks are narrow and gloomily
genteel; its brick walls are dingy and smoke-
blackened; its windows dark and diminutive:
but its vastness is untold.  When I lose myself
accidently in the labyrinthine regions of
Flaxen Square, or take a solitary walk there,
to air myself in the regions of aristocracy, I
look with awe and trembling on Jalabert's.
It has so many doors.  It seems so proudly
contemptuous of the struggles and exertions