om in a good hotel,
how miserably short does the appearance of a French one fall in the
estimation of the tired traveller. In exchange for the carpeted floor,
the well-curtained windows, the richly tapestried bed, the well cushioned
arm-chair, and the innumerable other luxuries which await him; he has
nought but a narrow, uncurtained bed, a bare floor, occasionally a
flagged one, three hard cane-bottomed chairs, and a looking-glass which
may convey an idea of how you would look under the combined influence of
the cholera, and a stroke of apoplexy, one half of your face being twice
the length of the other, and the entire of it of a bluish-green
tint--pretty enough in one of Turner's landscapes, but not at all
becoming when applied to the "human face divine." Let no late arrival
from the continent contradict me here by his late experiences, which a
stray twenty pounds and the railroads--(confound them for the same)
--have enabled him to acquire. I speak of matters before it occurred to
all Charing-Cross and Cheapside to "take the water" between Dover and
Calais, and inundate the world with the wit of the Cider Cellar, and the
Hole in the Wall. No! In the days I write of, the travelled were of
another genus, and you might dine at Very's or have your loge at "Les
Italiens," without being dunned by your tailor at the one, or confronted
with your washer-woman at the other. Perhaps I have written all this in
the spite and malice of a man who feels that his louis-d'or only goes
half as far now as heretofore; and attributes all his diminished
enjoyments and restricted luxuries to the unceasing current of his
countrymen, whom fate, and the law of imprisonment for debt, impel
hither. Whether I am so far guilty or not, is not now the question;
suffice it to say, that Harry Lorrequer, for reasons best known to
himself, lives abroad, where he will be most happy to see any of his old
and former friends who take his quarters en route; and in the words of a
bellicose brother of the pen, but in a far different spirit, he would
add, "that any person who feels himself here alluded to, may learn the
author's address at his publishers." "Now let us go back to our
muttons," as Barney Coyle used to say in the Dublin Library formerly
--for Barney was fond of French allusions, which occasionally too he
gave in their own tongue, as once describing an interview with Lord
Cloncurry, in which he broke off suddenly the conference, adding, "I
t