EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
the tourist's experience, but they had a reputation for overcharging, which is fairly maintained in our day. The tourist was advised: "There are a great many very good inns at Vienna, as the Court of Bavaria, the Golden Crown, the Black Eagle, the Black Elephant, etc., but in general they are very dear. Those who have occasion to be careful in their expenses should therefore board in private houses if they intend to make any stay in this capital."[1] Mariana Starke, at the end of the century, is less complimentary: "The inns of this City are bad and dear; Wolf's is deemed the best, and The White Bull once was tolerable; but the present master is so notorious a Cheat as not to scruple, after making a clear bargain, to deviate from it in every particular; besides which, his dinners are so bad that it is scarcely possible to eat them. Indeed, the only way of living comfortably at Vienna is to take a private lodging."[2] At Hamburg, says the same writer, the inns were "neither good nor cheap." … Private lodgings could be obtained; though, like the inns, they were "bad and dear."[3]
But the worst accommodations in the cities were luxurious in comparison with what was to be found in some of the country districts. Says a tourist in the latter part of the century, "Nothing can be more wretched than the country you pass through in travelling through Westphalia; the wretched inhabitants uniting poverty with pride, live with their hogs in mud-walled cottages, a dozen of which is called, by courtesy, a village, surrounded by black heaths, and wild uncultivated plains, over which the unresisted winds sweep with a velocity scarce to be conceived."[4] This picture is highly colored and not so flattering as some contemporary German estimates of Westphalia, but conditions in that region were, at all events, not arranged primarily for the tourist. "In the small villages," says Riesbeck, "there are no inns, and a man is forced to put up with the small farmers, who have nothing to set before him but brandy or potatoes, or some salted bacon and brown bread made of bran."[5] The bacon, it may be remarked, was cured in the house, which had "no outlet
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