The chief objections to and grounds for
denunciation of English hotels seem to be
these:  First, as to the performance of that
seemingly simple operation, washing your
hands.  You ring for the waiter, who says,
"Hands, sir?—yes, sir!" and goes away.
Then you ring again.  Then at last you
are introduced to a chambermaid, who,
after a tedious journey up-stairs and down-
stairs, conducts you to a bed-room, where
she draws the bed-curtains and pulls down
the blinds not because such is wanted, but
from mere mechanical habit.  Then you are
left to your own devices, with some hard
water that would curdle the soap if it would
dissolve; but you might as well wash with a
piece of chalk as with the singularly-hard
white cake in the soap-dish.  There is one
towel, damp and hard, like a piece of
embossed pasteboard; and with these aids you
may make what toilet you may, and then
come out to find the attendant waiting for
her fee at the door.

The next nuisance is having to pay what
you please to servants, without a fixed charge
in the bill.  Even commercial men have
generally a tariff of their own (it is threepence a
meal), but they will tell you themselves that
they are puzzled at times to know what to
do.  If such be the case, what must it be
with mere tourists and visitors, when the
donation received by one waiter with smiles
and thanks, is sulkily carried away by
another without a word, or with a muttered
question of "Whether it includes the
"Boots?""

A real grievance is wax candles; but a
grievance, as we have seen, not confined to
English hotels.  Mr. Albert Smith is peculiarly
sore upon the point, having been made first to
burn them and then to pay heavily for them at
all sorts of places.  When he is at home he does
not burn wax candles, and sensibly makes
bold to say that the majority of his readers do
not: they are content with Price or Palmer,
or a moderateur lamp, or better still, with
gas.  He recommends travellers not to have
private rooms unless they see that gas has
been introduced into them.  There is
something so enormously comic and absurd in a
stranger at an hotel sitting down alone in a
cheerless room with two grim wax candles
burning before him in dreary solemnity, that
he must be a dull fellow indeed who would
not laugh outright at this melancholy little
bit of state; if it were not for the annoyance
we all feel at having useless expense thrust
upon us.

Whenever Mr. Albert Smith sees pictures
of Pulling up to Unskid, or Down the Road, or
The Salisbury Rumbler meeting the Exeter
Delay upon Easterly Common, he is sure that,
in the room decorated with such pictures, wax
candles are made to burn at the Pope only
knows how much an inch; for these extortions
—it is the only proper word—chiefly
occur in the hotels that were great in those
days of misery, the fine old coaching times.
Of the coaching times and coaching inn our
pamphleteer has a fierce horror.  Years ago
he avowed that the writer who tried to
invest an inn with an idea of picturesque
comfort (I have sinned in that way myself more
than once, woe is me!), made a great
mistake: and so, he says, have all those who, in
the sturdiest traditional spirit, still believe or
make believe they believe so.  Light and
warmth after a cold night's journey make an
inn comfortable; so would be a brick-kiln or
a glass house, or a blacksmith's forge under
similar circumstances.  But the feeling at
arriving at an inn in the day-time, when
you know you have to stay there, is to
him irresistibly depressing.  Have you
never had the blues, O Reader, in some
gloomy hotel at Rotterdam on a wet day,
with a prospect of a fog in the afternoon and
a frost to-morrow?  The utter isolation in the
midst of bustle is bad enough; but everything
according to the lively explorer of the Bernese
Oberland, makes it worse in an English
hotel.  The chilling sideboard, with its formal
array of glasses; the thorough Swiss of the
household, whose services can only be
procured by paying for them; the empty tea-
caddy and backgammon board; the utter
absence of anything to beguile even two
minutes, beyond a local directory, a provincial
journal of last Saturday, or Paterson's
Roads; the staring, unfeeling pattern
of the paper, and, in the majority of country
places, the dreariness of the look-out; the
clogged inkstand and stumped pens; the
inability to protract a meal to six hours to get
rid of the day; and, above all, the anticipations
of a strange bed, with curtains you
cannot manage, and pillows you are not
accustomed to, and sheets of unusual fabric—
all these discomforts keep him from ever falling
into that rampant state of happiness at
an inn which popular delusion would assign
to a sojourn therein.  This is a truthful
picture—a daguerreotype of inn-dulness, but
is it not also true of the very liveliest
—so long as they are strange all over
Europe, all over the world.  A man may
travel from Dan to Beersheba and find all
barren.  Wet weather, cold, solitude in a
crowd, ill-health, bad spirits, will make
Naples or Genoa as horribly dull as Shepton
Mallet or Market Rasen.

Neither can our friend sleep comfortably in
that grand old temple of suffocation and
night-mare, the four-post-bedstead; although
this is one of the fine and ancient institutions
which it is the glory of England
to cling to.  Originally constructed in the
dark ages, when doors and windows
would not close and chimneys were blast
furnaces, and space was no object, it has come
down to us in all its original, imposing,
hearselike, presence—shorn only of its
surmounting plumes of dusty feathers, which
may yet be seen in some old places gloomily