once explained it to me, it is not only that the thing appears under an alias, but the alias comes up instead of the thing.  There is one essential which the old hotel often omitted to serve with your chicken, and which the new hotel supplies—­the salad.  This, however, few hotel cooks in England—­and far less hotel waiters—­can be trusted to prepare.  Their simple plan is to deluge the tender lettuce with some hateful ingredient called ‘salad mixture,’ poured out of a peculiarly shaped bottle, such as the law now compels poisons to be sold in; and the jewel is deserving of its casket—­it is almost poison.  Nor, alas! is security always to be attained by making one’s salad for one’s self.  For supposing even that the lettuce is fresh and white, and not manifestly a cabbage that is pretending to be a lettuce, how about the oil?  Charles Dickens used to say that he could always tell the character of an inn from its cruets; if they were dirty and neglected, all was bad.  The cruets are now clean enough in all hotels of pretension; but alas for that bottle which should contain (and perhaps did at some remote period contain) the oil of Lucca!  On the fingers of one hand I could count all the hotels in England which have not given me bad oil.  Whether it was never good, or whether it has gone bad, I leave to those philosophers who investigate the origin of evil.  I only know that it tastes as hair-oil smells.  As to the soups, they are no worse than they used to be, and no better; there is soup and there is hotel soup.

‘Gravy soup, fried sole, entree, leg of mutton, and apple tart’ used to be the unambitious menu of the old-fashioned inn.  The entree was terrible, but the fish, meat, and sweet were excellent.  I will say nothing of the entrees now; I am not in a position to say anything, for not being of a sanguine temperament, and having but a few years to live, I do not venture upon them.  But it is undeniable that our bill of fare is greatly more varied than it used to be, and that the way in which the table is arranged is much more attractive.  At the great hotels in the neighbourhood of London where rich, or at all events prodigal people, go to dine in the summer months, this is especially the case.  All these establishments affect fine dinners, yet how seldom it is they give you good ones!  Their wines, though monstrously dear, are very fair; indeed, of the champagnes at least you may make certain by looking at the corks; but the food!  How many of their fancifully named dishes might be included under the common title, Fiasco!

It was once suggested to a decayed man of fashion that an excellent profession for him to take up would be the proprietorship of an hotel of this class.  ‘You know what is really worth eating,’ said an influential friend of his, ’and these caterers for your own class evidently don’t; if you will undertake the management of the Mammoth (naming an inn of very high repute), I will furnish