hotels uniting, put the Marlborough into Coventry. The Marlburnians, when they appear at our balls, pass hostile criticisms on the fair Georgians, and express audibly their astonishment at our shockingly mixed society. We, on our part, on going to them are lost in amazement, every Friday evening, at their stiffness, their formality, the indifferent quality of their negus, and their other social deficiencies. Not to do this on one side and the other would be to run the risk of being treated as a lukewarm patriot, if not a traitor to one’s own signboard.
But the point in which the three hotels—or at least two out of the three—entirely resemble each other, is that of their internal economy and arrangements. You seem to yourself to be transported back to the eighteenth century, as you sit eating your Yorkshire cake in the vast breakfast room. That, like the still vaster and more dismal dining-room, is innocent of a carpet. The walls are painted with obsolete patterns and impossible flowers, the colours of which have gone off into a kind of faint chalkiness, like the colours of some of the pictures by Sir Joshua. In both rooms there is a musician’ gallery; a lyre, tragic and comic masks, crown, and G. R., the whole surrounded by a garland of flowers, are, I need hardly say, its pictorial decorations, the approach to which is by a rickety ladder, borrowed from the stable. The chairs are, I confess, a mystery to me. An antiquarian from Wardour Street should be brought down to sit in judgment upon them. I should not be in the least surprised to hear that they were bought a bargain at the London residences of the seven bishops, when those prelates, as we may well suppose, “declined housekeeping” on being committed to the Tower.
The bedrooms are destitute of bells and fireplaces. But a blazing coal and wood fire illuminates the ugly carpeted bar, shining through its red curtains and bringing into relief the steeplechasers and stage-coaches upon its walls, the portraits of great local Nimrods, and of the wonderful inhabitants of Sulphurwell, taken at the age of one hundred and ten, by command of her Majesty, Queen Charlotte. Seated in this bar, it becomes possible to conceive the idea of some one being left in charge of the house during the winter, a supposition which would otherwise give one a kind of cold shudder. For in those vast halls, and long re-echoing corridors, there must be, I take it, a winter season for ghosts—ghosts with three-cornered hats and gold-headed canes, ghosts in hoops and patches, marvelling each successive year at the little change which has come over the place since their days of a century ago. Why does not the gentleman who lately advertised in the papers for a haunted house come and spend a winter at Sulphurwell?
These are no spectres, however, the one hundred or so of male and female guests who are waked up to a sensation of appetite, or recalled from their dreadful potations at the well, by the sound of the eight o’clock breakfast gong. A glance at the side-tables will show the anticipated presence of flesh and blood. Legs of mutton, shoulders of mutton, haunch of mutton, saddle of mutton, ribs of mutton, other portions of mutton, if anatomy permit of their existence (we have slaughtered a sheep lately), form the staple of our fare. A huge tea-urn, something of the shape of the leaning tower of Pisa, furnishes the supply of hot water, which each guest causes to dribble out into his or her little antique tea-pot.
Our fare at Sulphurwell is of the heaviest, and our appetites, as in the case of travellers on a long sea voyage, Cambridge and Oxford undergraduates, country parsons, and other unemployed personages, of the most severe kind. The legs of mutton and rounds of beef reappear cold at the one o’clock luncheon, and are succeeded by hot and ponderous joints at the half-past five o’clock dinner. At eight, the digestion is astonished by the exhibition of muffins, Sally-luns, and Yorkshire cakes, under the name of “tea,” and is finally quite prostrated by the sandwiches and negus, or punch, peculiar to the place (having been much approved of on one of her visits by the Duchess of Marlborough), which terminate the day.
But amidst all this Homeric feasting, woe to the unhappy bachelor unattended (as literary bachelors are, for obvious reasons, wont to be) by a servant of his own. The four waiters attached to the establishment are to him not so much as spectral appearances, or indeed appearances of any kind. His meat, if he wish for any, must consist of the dish most nearly contiguous to him: his drink, like that of the Americans, must be taken after the repast, standing at the bar. Perhaps this is only one of the deep-laid traditional schemes of the place, to lure the single men into matrimony by cutting off the supplies, starving out, so to speak, the garrison which refuses to be taken by storm. Certain it is, that families who are habitués of the spot, bring down not only their own servants, but their own wines, their tea, sometimes their plate and table-linen, as travellers from St. Petersburgh to Moscow were in the habit of doing till within the last few years. There is one elderly Scotch gentleman near me at table, whom I have never yet ventured to ask for a slice of the salmon which stands, twice in the week, before him. I imagine it to be his private property, and to be directed to him for the use of himself and his family, from the shores of his native Tweed.
And yet, in the midst of this confusion, scarcely any one complains. Like Eothen, when he first sat down to his cup of coffee in a real desert, we are all of us glad to escape for awhile from the well-appointed tables of civilised life. The very scramble produces sociability. Strangers are more likely to become acquainted with each other at a pic-nic, than at a stately dinner of eight courses. Hence it is that a new comer, of gentlemanly address, finds himself almost immediately naturalised, and falls easily into one of the three or four family circles or clans which subdivide the hotel. Either he joins the Smith and Robinson families, in visiting the ruins and other points of attraction in the neighbourhood, or he attaches himself, in the same way, to the Browns, Joneses, and Jenkinsons. At the nightly balls—and surely there is no place in the world where there is so much dancing going on—the result of all this is to be seen in a greater degree of entrain than can perhaps be found in any other congregation of holiday-seeking Britons. Instead of sitting moodily